Effect of virtual reality on postural control in patient with vision impairment
Alireza Mollaei1 *, Elham Seihei2 , Narges Seihei3 , Fatemeh Zahra Sohrabi Nia4
- Student of Master of Physiotherapy, Research committee, Shiraz university of medical Sciences, shiraz, Iran
- Speech and language pathologist, Hormozgan, Iran
- Student of Environmental Health Engineering, School of Health, Ahvaz Jundishapour University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran
- Biomedical Engineering Student, University of Science and Arts of Yazd, Yazd, Iran.
Abstract: Vision impairments are among the leading risk factors for falls and falls-related injuries. A twofold increase in the risk of falling with severe vision impairment in one eye and mild/moderate visual disability in the other eye. During quiet standing of healthy young adults with peripheral visual field loss, increased peripheral visual field loss resulted in lower postural stability, (1) postural stability in the anterior-posterior (AP) direction was maintained contrary to the functional sensitivity hypothesis, and (2) peripheral visual field loss decreased the weighting of the visual input and increased that of the vestibular input to maintain equilibrium in the AP direction.
Methods: Science Direct, Pubmed, (2010 through 2021) were searched for English-language studies using a list of keywords. The books about physiotherapy and neuroscience and medicine were studied too.
Results: Virtual reality (VR) allowed us to develop a useful new tool with a wide range of visual per-turbations. Rather than only two levels of visual condition (eyes open and eyes closed), the VR stimulus can be continuously adjusted to produce a visual perturbation powerful enough to induce falls even in young healthy subjects and which has allowed us to determine a threshold for falls.
Conclusion: We observed that human visual detection is facilitated by a virtual postural threat in the wide horizontal field of view. The results of this study expand upon previous observations of threatening or emotional stimuli to neutral stimuli, presented under threatening conditions, to better understand the influence of threat on human visual perception.
