VIRTUAL REALITY THERAPY

Yes. A staff member stays with you throughout your session to help make sure you don’t bump into anything in the real room while you move through the virtual environment. Your technician watches your performance for signs that you are starting to tire and will adjust or stop your exercises when needed. Some people may feel briefly dizzy, queasy or tired during or after VR sessions, especially at first, and this usually passes quickly. Please tell us right away if you start to feel unwell.

We use several different types of exercises, depending on your needs. For example, many people who have had a concussion or mild traumatic brain injury have trouble keeping their eyes and head working together while following moving targets. For them, we often use an exercise with a target circle that represents the center of their vision. They are placed in a virtual star field and asked to follow a moving planet by keeping it inside the circle. Other exercises involve handling objects with virtual hands, or with mirror images of their hands. Still others involve scanning a wall of virtual balloons and popping the ones of a certain color.

The Virtualis system includes lifelike, detailed simulations of shopping malls, escalators, moving walkways, subways, traffic intersections, driving and even outdoor elevators. You can move around in these environments and handle virtual objects with your controllers.

Practicing in these challenging environments in a safe, gradual way can be an important step in regaining confidence in your everyday activities, with the goal of helping you get back to living the life you want.

For example, when people struggle with dizziness and vertigo, whether as a condition of its own or after an injury like a concussion, a trip to the grocery store can feel like an ordeal. Scanning a busy, complicated visual environment while you move through aisles full of moving people is a very demanding task for the brain. For people living with dizziness and vertigo, it can feel impossible. Often, just thinking about going grocery shopping can bring on anxiety or even a panic attack, and this can continue even after the dizziness and vertigo have improved.

Our Virtualis system includes a lifelike virtual grocery store where we can safely and gradually reintroduce this activity. You can walk around the store, reach out and take items from the shelves and put them in your virtual basket. The aisles are filled with other shoppers you need to move around. We add memory challenges by giving you a shopping list to remember before you go looking for your items. As you improve, we can make the environment gradually more complex, with longer lists and more people to avoid.

Shopping takes a lot of brain processing. It requires accurate eye movements as you look along the shelves. It uses gaze stabilization reflexes and coordinates your eye and head movements as you scan your surroundings, along with the vestibular reflexes that respond as you move forward down the aisle. The busy visual environment adds to the challenge, even more so with other shoppers moving around you. That alone would be a lot, and the mental effort of keeping track of a shopping list is often enough to push people past what they can handle.

With our Virtualis VR grocery store, we can adjust many parts of the shopping task. This helps us find the level where the task is challenging without bringing on your symptoms, then gradually increase the challenge as you build stamina. This helps bridge the gap between doing well in the clinic and handling everyday life in the outside world. That’s why VR therapy is often an important part of a NeuroRescue Program.

No. Virtual reality therapy is designed to be comfortable, and most people find it painless. Because the virtual environments are meant to gently challenge your senses, you may briefly feel a little dizzy, queasy or tired at times, especially during your first few sessions, and these feelings usually pass quickly. If anything feels uncomfortable, tell us right away and we will adjust your session.