A P300 clustering of mild cognitive impairment patients stimulated in an immersive virtual reality scenario

Abstract

In this paper, we present an innovative framework useful for clustering patients affected by a mild cognitive impairment and designed to improve the living environment and the lifestyle of patients in order to delay their cognitive state decline. The cognitive state changes are evaluated by means the event - related potentials elicited by environmental stimuli administered in several Virtual Reality scenarios. In particular, we formerly describe our innovative Virtual Reality environment, the protocol of stimuli administration, the procedure to measure the P300 latency in the response signal and finally the Self Organizing Map used to cluster the data. This research finds application in the fields of re-qualification of the environments for patients and healthcare introducing a new method for evaluation of best living conditions through VR.