A pilot study of integrating virtual reality into cognitive stimulation therapy : effects on cognition in people with concurrent visual impairment and dementia

Abstract

 The study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) on people with concurrent visual impairment and dementia (PwVID). Seven participants received CST and significant improvement was found in the average performance of all the participants not only on general cognition as illustrated by improvement on Montreal Cognitive Assessment – Visual Impairment version, but also on short term memory, working memory, executive function and semantic memory respectively, which provided evidence to support the use of CST in PwVID. This study further examined the feasibility of integrating Virtual Reality technology into CST (VR CST). VR CST was found to have high feasibility at the level of technical execution. Two out of five participants demonstrated cognitive improvement in at least two cognitive domains respectively, which established the preliminary evidence on treatment effectiveness of VR CST. Further research is needed to apply VR CST in people with dementia only in order to fully examine any possible enhancement effect brought by VR under no constraints of the participants’ visual ability to reconcile limitation. Future study could also investigate the clinical significance of CST by evaluating the functional impact of the cognitive improvement on the daily living of PwVID.