Personalization of Virtual Environments Navigation and Tasks for Neurorehabilitation

The use of “serious” computer games designed for other purposes than purely leisure is becoming a recurrent research topic in diverse areas from professional training and education to psychiatric and neuropsychological rehabilitation. In particular 3D computer games have been introduced in neuropsychological rehabilitation of cognitive functions to train daily activities. In general, these games are based on the first person paradigm. Patients control an avatar who moves around in a 3D virtual scenario. They manipulate virtual objects in order to perform daily activities such as cooking or tidying up a room. The underlying hypothesis of Cognitive Neuropsychological Virtual Rehabilitation (CNVR) systems is that 3D Interactive Virtual Environments (VE) can provide good simulations of the real world yielding to an effective transfer of virtual skills to real capacities (Rose et al., 2005). Other potential advantages of CNVR are that they are highly motivating, safe and controlled, and they can recreate a diversity of scenarios (Guo et al., 2004). Virtual tasks are easy to document automatically. Moreover, they are reproducible, which is useful for accurate analyses of the patients behavior.