RICCAmente

An experimental project designed to create cognitive rehabilitating simulations in virtual reality, capable of restoring space-time awareness functions in patients with congenital or acquired brain damage. Every simulation developed will involve the construction of rehabilitation programmes that will be highly tailored to chosen patients and their personal experience, and will allow medical staff to check, review and analyse data.
Once this research and experimentation is completed, it will allow us to identify the best features for an innovative VR (Virtual Reality) hardware and software rehabilitation platform for use by patients and specialists. The project presented here aims to achieve the following goals and carry out the following activities:

• to investigate which tools and what kind of technology could be successfully used in the cognitive and psychological rehabilitation of patients with congenital and acquired brain damage limited to spatial awareness and time perception faculties, faculties that are damaged in a high number of brain diseases;
• to design and create an innovative Web-oriented virtual reality platform that allows users to access rehabilitation programmes based on the use of highly realistic virtual scenarios that can be personalised and contextualised in line with a patient’s personal experience;
• to provide medical staff with suitable tools for monitoring, reviewing and analysing the results reached during rehabilitation in order to facilitate the sharing and comparison of these results with those reached in other locations;
• to experiment and evaluate in practice the effectiveness of the prototypes constructed when used as an integral part of the physical rehabilitation procedures carried out in health centres specialising in treating patients with brain damage.