An immersive virtual reality exergame as a patient education approach in fibromyalgia: Pilot study.

Background: Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) has been applied in pain management for various conditions, but its use in fibromyalgia (FM) remains underexplored. While physical activity plays a role in treating FM, patients' low tolerance often limits its effectiveness. After reviewing the literature on VR and games for FM, we designed a novel VR exergame to assist FM patients in performing physical activity, and evaluate its feasibility.

Introducing Virtual Reality in a STEMI Coronary Syndrome Course: Qualitative Evaluation with Nurses and Doctors.

In the increasing number of medical education topics taught with virtual reality (VR), the prehospital management of ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) had not been considered. This article proposes an implemented VR system for STEMI training and introduces it in an institutional course addressed to emergency nurses and case manager (CM) doctors. The system comprises three different applications to, respectively, allow (a) the course instructor to control the conditions of the virtual patient, (b) the CM to communicate with the nurse in the virtual field and receive from him/her the patient's parameters and electrocardiogram, and (c) the nurse to interact with the patient in the immersive VR scenario.

Improving Knowledge Retention and Perceived Control Through Serious Games: A Study About Assisted Emergency Evacuation.

Digital games for education and training, also called serious games (SGs), have shown beneficial effects on learning in several studies. In addition, some studies are suggesting that SGs could improve user's perceived control, which affects the likelihood that the learned content will be applied in the real world. However, most SG studies tend to focus on immediate effects, providing no indication on knowledge and perceived control over time, especially in contrast with nongame approaches.

A mobile app for home-based exercise in spinal cord injured persons: Proposal and pilot study.

Background And Objective: To preserve cardiovascular health in persons with spinal cord injury (SCI), it is important to promote physical activity programs adapted to them. Home-based exercise programs allow patients to perform clinician-prescribed physical activity without going to a hospital. However, they make it difficult for the clinician to guide and monitor the patient.

A virtual reality methodology for cardiopulmonary resuscitation training with and without a physical mannequin.

Background: Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is an emergency procedure that can increase survival after a cardiac arrest. Performing CPR effectively requires both procedural knowledge and manual skills. Traditional CPR training methodology includes lessons led by instructors and supervised practice on mannequins, thus requiring considerable resources.

Learning Safety Through Public Serious Games: A Study of "Prepare for Impact" on a Very Large, International Sample of Players.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in serious games (SGs), i.e., digital games for education and training.

Smartphone-Based Therapeutic Exercises for Men Affected by Premature Ejaculation: A Pilot Study.

Introduction: Smartphone-delivered healthcare interventions allow patients to access services on demand when needed, improving motivation and compliance. However, the use of mobile health apps has been scarcely explored in sexual medicine.

Aim: To evaluate the effects of integrating psychological treatment for premature ejaculation (PE) with a mobile coaching app that offers therapeutic exercises on the patient's smartphone.

Locomotion in Place in Virtual Reality: A Comparative Evaluation of Joystick, Teleport, and Leaning.

Recent VR head-mounted displays for consumers feature 3-DOF or 6-DOF head tracking. However, position tracking (when available) is limited to a small area. Moreover, in small or cluttered physical spaces, users can safely experience VR only by staying in place, standing or seated.

MotorBrain: A mobile app for the assessment of users' motor performance in neurology.

Background And Objective: Human motor skills or impairments have been traditionally assessed by neurologists by means of paper-and-pencil tests or special hardware. More recently, technologies such as digitizing tablets and touchscreens have offered neurologists new assessment possibilities, but their use has been restricted to a specific medical condition, or to stylus-operated mobile devices. The objective of this paper is twofold.

Neuroanatomical basis of concern-based altruism in virtual environment.

Costly altruism entails helping others at a cost to the self and prior work shows that empathic concern (EC) for the well-being of distressed and vulnerable individuals is one of the primary motivators of such behavior. However, extant work has investigated costly altruism with paradigms that did not feature self-relevant and severe costs for the altruist and have solely focused on neurofunctional, and not neuroanatomical, correlates. In the current study, we used a contextually-rich virtual reality environment to study costly altruism and found that individuals who risked their own lives in the virtual world to try to save someone in danger had enlarged right anterior insula and exhibited greater empathic concern than those who did not.

Effects of Different Types of Virtual Reality Display on Presence and Learning in a Safety Training Scenario.

The increasing availability of head-mounted displays (HMDs) for home use motivates the study of the possible effects that adopting this new hardware might have on users. Moreover, while the impact of display type has been studied for different kinds of tasks, it has been scarcely explored in procedural training. Our study considered three different types of displays used by participants for training in aviation safety procedures with a serious game.

Designing Serious Games for Safety Education: "Learn to Brace" versus Traditional Pictorials for Aircraft Passengers.

Serious games for safety education (SGSE) are a novel tool for preparing people to prevent and\or handle risky situations. Although several SGSE have been developed, design and evaluation methods for SGSE need to be better grounded in and guided by safety-relevant psychological theories. In particular, this paper focuses on threat appeals and the assessment of variables, such as safety locus of control, that influence human behavior in real risky situations.

Assessing Knowledge Retention of an Immersive Serious Game vs. a Traditional Education Method in Aviation Safety.

Thanks to the increasing availability of consumer head-mounted displays, educational applications of immersive VR could now reach to the general public, especially if they include gaming elements (immersive serious games). Safety education of citizens could be a particularly promising domain for immersive serious games, because people tend not to pay attention to and benefit from current safety materials. In this paper, we propose an HMD-based immersive game for educating passengers about aviation safety that allows players to experience a serious aircraft emergency with the goal of surviving it.

Brain activity and prosocial behavior in a simulated life-threatening situation.

To study the neuronal basis of altruistic behavior, we investigated functional connectivity within brain networks of participants who exhibited either a self-benefit behavior or an altruistic one in a life-threatening situation simulated in a virtual environment. In particular, participants were asked to evacuate a virtual building on fire and, without being previously informed, they were faced with a decision on whether to stop and help a trapped virtual human, at the possible cost of losing their own life in the virtual experience. Group independent component analysis (gICA) applied on blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) functional images revealed significant differences between the group of participants who showed selfish behavior and those who acted prosocially.

Affective basis of judgment-behavior discrepancy in virtual experiences of moral dilemmas.

Although research in moral psychology in the last decade has relied heavily on hypothetical moral dilemmas and has been effective in understanding moral judgment, how these judgments translate into behaviors remains a largely unexplored issue due to the harmful nature of the acts involved. To study this link, we follow a new approach based on a desktop virtual reality environment. In our within-subjects experiment, participants exhibited an order-dependent judgment-behavior discrepancy across temporally separated sessions, with many of them behaving in utilitarian manner in virtual reality dilemmas despite their nonutilitarian judgments for the same dilemmas in textual descriptions.

Evaluation of a 3D serious game for advanced life support retraining.

Objective: Advanced life support (ALS) knowledge and skills decrease in as little as three months, but only a few ALS providers actually attend retraining courses. We assess the effectiveness of a 3D serious game as a new tool for frequent ALS retraining.

Methods: We developed a 3D serious game for scenario-based ALS retraining.

Changing heartbeat perception to induce anxiety in virtual environments.

In this paper, we first propose a general technique to induce anxiety in virtual environments (VEs) which exploits auditory heartbeat perception and biofeedback. Then, we consider a VE that reproduces a real-world anxiety-inducing experience (being suddenly surrounded by smoke during a fire evacuation of a building), and we describe an experiment that contrasts 3 conditions: (i) an augmentation of the VE with a bar that indicates when the user's avatar gets hurt, (ii) an augmentation of the VE with the typical audio visual stimuli which are employed in violent videogames when the user's avatar gets hurt, (iii) introduction of the proposed biofeedback technique in the previous condition. We carry out an electrodermal analysis showing that the introduction of the proposed technique produces much higher physiological arousal in terms of skin conductance level (SCL) than the other two conditions.

Virtual reality in autism: state of the art.

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by core deficits with regard to three domains, i.e. social interaction, communication and repetitive or stereotypic behaviour.

MOPET: a context-aware and user-adaptive wearable system for fitness training.

Objective: Cardiovascular disease, obesity, and lack of physical fitness are increasingly common and negatively affect people's health, requiring medical assistance and decreasing people's wellness and productivity. In the last years, researchers as well as companies have been increasingly investigating wearable devices for fitness applications with the aim of improving user's health, in terms of cardiovascular benefits, loss of weight or muscle strength. Dedicated GPS devices, accelerometers, step counters and heart rate monitors are already commercially available, but they are usually very limited in terms of user interaction and artificial intelligence capabilities.

VU-flow: a visualization tool for analyzing navigation in virtual environments.

This paper presents a tool for the visual analysis of navigation patterns of moving entities, such as users, virtual characters, or vehicles in 3D Virtual Environments (VEs). The tool, called VU-Flow, provides a set of interactive visualizations that highlight interesting navigation behaviors of single or groups of moving entities that were the VE together or separately. The visualizations help to improve the design of VEs and to study the navigation behavior of users, e.

Information visualization and its application to medicine.

This paper provides an introduction to the field of information visualization (IV) and a discussion of its application to medical systems. More specifically, it aims at: (i) defining what IV is and what are its goals (ii) highlighting the similarities and differences between IV and traditional medical imaging (iii) illustrating the potential of IV for medical applications by examining several examples of implemented systems and (iv) giving some general indications about the purposes and the effective exploitation of an IV component into a medical system.

Abstraction on clinical data sequences: an object-oriented data model and a query language based on the event calculus.

In this work, we deal with temporal abstraction of clinical data. Abstractions are, for example, blood pressure state (e.g.

Using a general theory of time and change in patient monitoring: experiment and evaluation.

In this paper, we propose to use one of the well-known general theories of time and change, namely the Event Calculus (Kowalski and Sergot, New Generation Computing 4, 67-95, 1986), to represent temporal aspects in intelligent medical monitoring systems. In particular, we explore the application of CEC (Chittaro and Montanari, Computational Intelligence 12, 359-382, 1996) (an efficient implementation of the Event Calculus) to the management of mechanical ventilation. First, we present the prototype we have built, which has been extensively tested on patient's data from real clinical cases.