VR4ICU – Immersive VR for Cognitive Rehabilitation of ICU Patients

Between 50% to 75% of discharged ICU survivors suffer from Post-Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS), a combination of physical, cognitive and psychological impairments. Up to 50% of patients show long-term physical impairment, 75% report cognitive limitations and 62% show a higher risk of developing psychiatric disorders. PICS also entails social consequences, forcing about 33% of patients to change jobs to lower paid occupations because of reduced cognitive and physical ability.

The VR4ICU project aims to investigate the hypotheses that VR cognitive training tasks delivered by Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) are an effective intervention to reduce cognitive decline in ICU patients. To this extent the project proposes a step forward in current ICU VR interventions, exploiting the immersion effect of VR with HMD to embed patients in relaxing virtual environments where different cognitive training tasks are progressively delivered.

Osler – Computer-Assisted Anamnesis

Misdiagnosis is still a major health care problem, with nearly half of all severe diagnostic errors resulting from failures of physicians to gather and analyse important data about the patient throughout medical history-taking, bedside examination, and bedside decision logic. The problem is of particular concern in primary care, where misdiagnosis is reported to account for the majority of errors, many resulting in serious injury or death.

Osler is a Computer-Assisted Anamnesis system that uses state-of-the-art physiological sensors (e.g. BP, SpO2, HR, BBT, ECG, GSR) and smart patient-computer interaction strategies to collect a detailed data set about the patient’s condition. The system has been on trial at São João University Hospital Center since March, 2021. Osler resulted from the rethinking of the entire anamnesis process on the light of state-of-the-art HCI methods, ubiquitous physiological sensors and AI. The system is capable of continuously monitoring the patient physiological information during the anamnesis process and uses this information, together with the CC, medical algorithms data and enquiry responses, to train an AI model for personalised interaction with the patient.

StableHand VR

A third of all injuries at work are sustained to the hand, and hand and wrist injuries are estimated to account between 10% to 30% of all Emergency Department (ED) attendances. In 2017, there were approximately 18 million hand and wrist fractures, 2 million thumb amputations and 4 million non-thumb digit amputations worldwide. Several injuries, disabilities and diseases can affect manual motor control. Hand physiotherapy is indispensable to restore hand functionality. However, this process is often a strenuous and cognitively demanding experience.

StableHand VR is a research project in collaboration with Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Eberhard Karls University, BG Klinik Tuebingen. The project proposes a Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) serious game with hand tracking to improve conventional physiotherapy in hand rehabilitation. It focuses on resolving recurring limitations reported in most technological solutions to the problem, namely the limited diversity support of movements and exercises, complicated calibrations, and exclusion of patients with open wounds or other disfigurements of the hand.