In recent years, there has been growing interest in designing nonpharmacological interventions to improve the quality of life for People with Dementia (PwD) who face motor impairments. This paper investigates the feasibility of using Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for the rehabilitation of 20 patients with moderate to severe dementia residing in a confined psychiatric hospital and discusses the impact of this interactions on motor training. To accomplish this, we present three interrelated studies that refer to: (1) System requirement analysis carried out through a workshop with experts in dementia care; (2) System interaction method assessment by testing two different types of interaction in Virtual Reality, to identify the most suitable for People with Dementia; and (3) A pilot study with patients performing three upper limb physiotherapy tasks in Virtual Reality. The issues encountered during the design, testing and execution of the experimental tasks are discussed and a set of guidelines and recommendations for the future deployment of VR in healthcare services is provided.
Chatbots are becoming a trend in many fields such as medical, service industry and more recently in education. Especially in healthcare education, there is a growing interest in integrating chatbots in the learning and teaching processes mostly because of their portability and affordance. In this paper, we seek to explore the primary uses of chatbots in medical education, as well as how they are developed. We elaborate on current chatbot applications and research enacted in the domains of medical and healthcare education, We focus in the areas of virtual patients in medical education, patients' education related to healthcare matters but also chatbots as course assistance in for enhancing healthcare professionals' curricula. Additionally, we examine the metrics that have been used to evaluate these chatbots, which include subjective ones like the usability and acceptability by the users, and objectives ones, like their accuracy and users' skills evaluation. Overall, even though chatbots offer a flexible solution and a vast possibility to improve healthcare education, our literature review suggests that their efficacy has not been thoroughly tested. Also, limited examples of chatbots in European Healthcare curricula have been found. These call of the need for further research towards this direction.
Physical abilities are essential to goalkeepers in soccer but the involved cognitive abilities for these players have only recently become the focus of extensive research. In this study, we investigated the role of different aspects of attention in a basic goalkeeping task in soccer. One hundred participants assumed the role of a goalkeeper in immersive virtual reality (VR) and carried out a task that entailed blocking balls shot towards their goal. In addition, they carried out two computerized tasks each assessing different attentional abilities: the Attention Network Test provided scores for three well-established networks of attention, namely the alerting, the orienting, and the executive control. The Whack-a-Mole task evaluated inhibitory control, by measuring performance in a classic Go/No-Go task and tapping on response inhibition. A regression analysis revealed that all three attention network scores contributed to performance in the VR goalkeeping task. Furthermore, performance in the Whack-a-Mole task correlated significantly with performance in the VR goalkeeping task. Overall, findings confirm that cognitive skills relating to attention play a critical role in the efficient execution of soccer-specific tasks. These findings have important implications for the training of cognitive skills in sports.
This paper presents a new approach for teaching the clinical skills course by exploiting the potential of a Virtual Reality application utilizing 360° videos with medical content for an undergraduate level course. We discuss the methodology prospects and identify the potential role of Virtual Reality reusable e-resources into learning and practicing clinical skills and the concept of embedding these processes to a real assess-educateassess cycle that uses digital tools to optimize outcome. Scenarios, were developed in the context of the CoViRR Erasmus+ project, offering new insights for the digital integration in learning and teaching. The initial results of our analysis validated the effective design of a technologically enhanced learning tool as an addition to the existing methods used in medical education. Future work should integrate the application into the classroom and evaluate its effectiveness with real end-users.
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