Effect analysis of virtual-reality vestibular rehabilitation based on eye-tracking

Abstract

Vertigo is one of the most common complaints encountered by physicians and the patients are steadily increasing. These patients are exposed to the risk of secondary accidents such as falls due to vertigo. There are two ways to improve this symptom: medication and rehabilitation. Although temporary symptomatic improvement may be expected in patients treated with medication, vertigo may recur and medication can delay central compensation. In contrast vestibular rehabilitation exploits central mechanisms of neuroplasticity to increase postural stability and enhance visual-vestibular interactions in situations that generate conflicting sensory information. However, vestibular rehabilitation may be compromised by incorrect performance of exercises, and there is a need for active effort and interest from the patient during rehabilitation. To solve these problems, we decided to apply FOVE HMD for eye-tracking and Unity3D to create virtual reality. The proposed eye-tracking based algorithm calculates the concentration of users with eye tracking data and calculates the motion width of the patient with nystagmus, thus the severity of the patient according to the score can be determined. According to our experimental test against healty group and patients group, this result showed the meaningful data to use define the contents result.