Development of Virtual Reality Tools for Assessment of Return-to-Duty Status following Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI)

Our Virtual-Reality-Assessment-Modules (VRAM) successful efforts already include developing functional prototypes of small arms trainers that enable advanced assessment screening capacities with rapid sequential or simultaneous cognitive and physiological loading on militarily relevant tasks. Our innovations include exploiting exponential differences that are easily detectable within impaired individuals’ performance under specific conditions that include both cognitive and physical stresses. Beyond conventional performance, temporal, and physiological assessment measures we have added emotional face reading, attentional eye-tracking, and advanced audio/visual hearing and listening assessments as additional assessment dimensions, complete with medical staff focused visualization and feedback displays. Further, we have wearable head/body/limb tracking from COTS wireless game controllers, along with 2010 upgrades scheduled to Project NATAL where “you are the controller”. Our extremely low-cost VRAM system designs and functional prototypes enable rapid setup and use within typically sized medical exam rooms or gyms. Users can select from PCs, Game-Consoles, or Handheld Smart Devices for standalone or networked uses within web browsers for convenience, or as thick clients as required by military and Veterans Administration secure networks. VRAM also supports modular add-on use with existing operational small arms training, medical, and exercise systems, enabling entirely new classes of assessment for medical, operational, and sports enhancements.