Comparing adaptive cognitive training in virtual reality and paper-and-pencil in a sample of stroke patients
The growing number of people with cognitive
deficits creates an urgent need for new cognitive training
solutions. Paper-and-pencil tasks are still widely used for
cognitive rehabilitation despite the proliferation of new
computer-based methods, like VR-based simulations of ADL’s.
The health professionals’ resistance in adopting new tools
might be explained by the small number of validation trials.
Studies have established construct validity of VR assessment
tools with their paper-and-pencil version by demonstrating
significant associations with their traditional construct-driven
measures. However, adaptive rehabilitation tools for
intervention are mostly not equivalent to their counterpart
paper-and-pencil versions, which makes it difficult to carry out
comparative studies. Here we present a 12-session intervention
study with 31 stroke survivors who underwent different
rehabilitation protocols based on the same content and
difficulty adaptation progression framework: 17 performed
paper-and-pencil training with the Task Generator and 14
performed VR-based training with the Reh@City. Results
have shown that both groups performed at the same level and
there was not an effect of the training methodology in overall
performance. However, the Reh@City enabled more intensive
training, which may translate in more cognitive improvements.
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