Validation of a rehabilitation platform for visuomotor perceptual and cognitive stimulation

Abstract

Stroke, or cerebrovascular accident, is a major global health problem and one of the leading causes of death and acquired disability worldwide. After a stroke, deficits in perceptual and cognitive functions may arise, with particular emphasis to impairments caused to visuomotor skills. In this way, its stimulation, within a therapeutic rehabilitation context, is truly relevant for the recovery of lost functions. RehabVisual, presented in earlier works, is a digital platform that allows for an objective and standardized assessment of visuomotor skills and specific clinical interventions for each patient. In the current work, new features are added to the platform, to make it more optimized and suitable for use in clinical practice, with adults who suffered a stroke. Herein the platform is also thoroughly validated with healthy subjects.Objective: This work’s goals are twofold: to assess the accuracy of the eye tracking system developed, which is integrated in the platform; and to test and validate the digital platform itself, with a population of healthy subjects.Methodology: 50 healthy subjects tested the RehabVisual digital platform in a laboratory context. In addition to testing the overall visuomotor rehabilitation functions, dynamic stimuli following was collected from both the platform’s own camera and a Tobii Pro Nano Eye Tracker, which is considered as gold standard to assess direction of gaze. The results of both systems were compared.Results: The platform’s own eye tracking apparatus revealed a good performance, in par with the gold standard, following the evolution of visual stimuli with sufficient accuracy, which ensures the suitability of its use in the context of gaze detection during rehabilitation. Conclusions: The validated gaze tracking ability, together with fact that both stimulus delivery and eye tracking is performed with the same device guarantees synchrony between both streams of data. Recorded videos of those signals allows for the design of new and personalized clinical evaluation and intervention strategies, to be applied throughout the rehabilitation program. Those may be used to complement physiotherapist’s evaluation of patients and allow for the identification of possible changes in their visuomotor skills.As an added feature, a new usability questionnaire was filled by a group of occupational therapists, which reinforced the potential use of the new version of RehabVisual, when applied to visuomotor rehabilitation of stroke patients.