Exploring cognitive-social factors underlying pedestrian navigation following chronic moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (m/sTBI) using virtual environments

Dysfunctions in reading emotions of others, mobility and social participation are hallmarks of m/sTBI. This project addresses all three, responding to the AQTC’s need to further understand and raise awareness about nonverbal communication deficits of persons with m/sTBI and their impact on function, participation and inclusion. Specifically, an inability to recognise emotion during a collision avoidance task can negatively affect interpersonal interactions, leading to poor social participation and inclusion. With AQTC’s input, the team will develop virtual reality (VR) scenarios with avatars to investigate emotion recognition abilities during mobility in m/sTBI participants and their impact on pedestrian interactions for collision avoidance. Results and VR scenarios will be used for presentation/discussion at AQTC with the different stakeholders, to develop awareness material and to support the future development of a VR tool for the assessment and training of social cognition abilities, with all actions targeting enhanced social participation and inclusion after m/sTBI.

Objectives:

This project will specifically aim to further the understanding of the impact of social cognition on an important mobility task involving social interactions, pedestrian collision avoidance, as well as to understand the related deficits in chronic m/sTBI. The ultimate short-term goal is to raise awareness on such deficits for people with m/sTBI and, over the longer term, improve social participation and social inclusion for them.

Milestones:

• Obtain ethical approval
• Technological development:
  1. Development avatars with different gait patterns
  2. Development of avatars with different facial expression
• Creation of virtual community environments and scenarios and refinement
• Data collection
• Data analysis
• Dissemination of findings: Creation of awareness material, presentation at AQTC office and dissemination to the scientific community (articles and scientific conferences)

Last update : July 15, 2020