Parkinson’s sufferers live in virtual reality

A new study has suggested ‘virtual reality’ and physical reality exercises can be used to provide effective stimuli to increase movement speeds in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Virtual reality is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can mimic a physical presence in the ‘real world’.

Most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen and some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones

Investigators in Taiwan studied a group of 13 women and 16 men with Parkinson’s disease who were age-matched against 14 women and 11 men without Parkinson’s.

Each participant was asked to reach for and grasp a stationary ball as quickly as possible. The balls were then moved down a ramp and the participants were told to catch them when they reached a particular point on the ramp.

When trying to catch the moving balls, the targets were visible for periods from 1.1 to 0.5 seconds. These trials were done in both normal physical reality and in a virtual reality environment.

In both types of environments, the Parkinson’s group had a longer movement time and lower peak velocity (speed) when reaching for the stationary ball than those without the disease.

However, researchers found that movement time was much shorter and peak velocity higher in the faster cueing conditions. The Parkinson’s group also showed more improvement in movement time and peak velocity when given moving targets.

As a result, the people with Parkinson’s were able to match the performance of those not suffering from the condition, the study found.

This study is said to help in the rehabilitation of Parkinson’s patients, providing evidence on how to manipulate task and environmental constraints to improve movement in people with the disease.

“Specifically, this study shows how to manipulate virtual reality scenarios to improve movement speeds in people with Parkinson’s, while at the same time depicting their movement characteristics in virtual reality,” lead investigator, Hui-Ing Ma, said.

Dr Ma said the study’s findings suggested that with an appropriate choice of “cueing speed”, virtual reality is a promising tool for offering visual motion stimuli to increase movement speed in Parkinson’s disease patients.

The study will be published in next month’s issue of the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.