Virtual Reality-Induced Symptoms and Effects (VRISE): A Balance Assessment Approach for Parkinson's Disease

• Published in: 2023 IEEE 13th International Conference on CYBER Technology in Automation, Control, and Intelligent Systems (CYBER) pp. 962 - 967
• Main Authors: Wei, Bingqing, Fan, Yuhan, Wu, Yaxuan, Huang, Shouwang, Sun, Luyao, You, Yugen, Yu, Ningbo
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 11.07.2023
• Subjects: balance assessment; Electromyography; Event detection; Parkinson's disease; Performance evaluation; Resists; Virtual environments; virtual reality; Visualization; wearable sensors
• ISSN: 2642-6633
• DOI: 10.1109/CYBER59472.2023.10256589

Balance disorders are the main symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), which can lead to a high risk of falls, fractures and impairments. Early identification of balance disorders in PD and performing timely rehabilitation can resist the progressive tendency of the activity limitations. However, clinical assessment tests of balance appear to rely on therapists, who may fail to capture changes of dysfunction in the early stage of PD, since some deficits only appear in specific situations. There is a need for an efficient approach to induce the symptoms of the patients and be capable of detecting mild balance dysfunction in early PD assessment. In this pilot study, an imbalance events detection approach based on virtual reality-induced symptoms and effects (VRISE) is proposed for Parkinson's disease balance assessment. A virtual environment was designed to provide misleading visual feedback to the subjects in order to induce the imbalance events. Electromyography (EMG) and plantar pressure signals were recorded and utilized to quantitatively evaluate the balance ability of subjects. The proposed approach can successfully induce and detect the imbalance events of the subjects, which suggests that it has the potential to be used in the assessment of the balance ability of patients with PD.