Affiliations: Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Correspondence:
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Address for correspondence: David W.K. Man, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong. Tel.: +852 2766 6711; Fax: +852 2330 8656; E-mail: David.Man@polyu.edu.hk
Abstract: Acquired brain injuries (ABI) may display cognitive impairments and lead to long-term disabilities including prospective memory (PM) failure. Prospective memory serves to remember to execute an intended action in the future. PM problems would be a challenge to an ABI patient's successful community reintegration. While retrospective memory (RM) has been extensively studied, treatment programs for prospective memory are rarely reported. The development of a treatment program for PM, which is considered timely, can be cost-effective and appropriate to the patient's environment. A 12-session virtual reality (VR)-based cognitive rehabilitation program was developed using everyday PM activities as training content. 37 subjects were recruited to participate in a pretest-posttest control experimental study to evaluate its treatment effectiveness. Results suggest that significantly better changes were seen in both VR-based and real-life PM outcome measures, related cognitive attributes such as frontal lobe functions and semantic fluency. VR-based training may be well accepted by ABI patients as encouraging improvement has been shown. Large-scale studies of a virtual reality-based prospective memory (VRPM) training program are indicated.
