Comparing the Impact of Virtual Reality and Paper and Pencil on Psychosocial Rehabilitation

Instituto Irmãs Hospitaleiras Sagrado Coração de Jesus

Status: Completed

Conditions: Psychiatric Disease

Treatments: Other: Virtual reality; Other: Paper and Pencil

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04291586

Casa de Saúde Câmara Pestana

Details and patient eligibility

About

Virtual Reality allows the integration of cognitive rehabilitation in a more ecologically valid context.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether this methodology has more impact on psychosocial rehabilitation than a paper and pencil personalized program.

Full description

Cognitive impairments are frequently present on many psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, depression, etc. and are not always given sufficient attention despite its limitations in activities of daily living (ADL's). Current cognitive rehabilitation methods mostly rely on paper-and-pencil tasks targeting isolated domains, which is not consistent with everyday life, and have limited ecological validity.

Virtual Reality (VR) has shown to be a solution for the development of accessible and ecologically valid systems but, does it have more impact than a paper and pencil personalized intervention?

Through a participatory design approach, with health professionals, the investigators have developed:

a motor-accessible and cognitive-personalized VR-based system, where conventional cognitive tasks were operationalized in meaningful simulations of ADL's (Reh@City) and; a web tool which generates personalized paper and pencil tasks (Task Generator).

The investigators goal is to have a sample of 30 inpatients from a psychosocial rehabilitation unit, with no age limit, randomly allocated in two groups: 1) the experimental group, where participants will perform 30 minutes of the VR training with Reh@City; and 2) the control group, where participants will perform 30 minutes of the paper and pencil training with the Task Generator.

Enrollment: 29 patients

Sex: Female

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Inpatients of psychosocial rehabilitation unit;
• Cognitive deficit but with enough capacity to understand the task and follow instructions;
• Able to read and write.

Exclusion criteria

• Patients experiencing an acute psychiatric episode.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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29 participants in 2 patient groups

Virtual Reality

Experimental group

Description:

The Virtual Reality group will perform personalized activities of daily living in the context of a simulated city (Reh@City). The interaction with the virtual environment will be through a natural user interface.

Treatment:

Other: Virtual reality

Paper and Pencil

Active Comparator group

Description:

The paper and pencil group will perform a set of cognitive paper and pencil tasks personalized to their deficits and generated automatically through a Task Generator.

Treatment:

Other: Paper and Pencil