Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Virtual Reality
The Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDD) are a group of conditions with onset in the developmental period. The disorders typically manifest early in development, often before the child enters grade school, and are characterized by developmental deficits that produce impairments of personal, social, academic, or occupational functioning. The range of developmental deficits varies from very specific limitations of learning or control of executive functions to global impairments of social skills or intelligence. The neurodevelopmental disorders frequently co-occur; for example, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have intellectual disability (intellectual developmental disorder), and many children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) also have a specific learning disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).
Virtual Reality (VR) as a methodology applied to the evaluation and intervention of NDD has shown its usefulness in various research fields. Children and adults with NDD suffer from a variety of emotional and social difficulties including high levels of depression, anxiety, poor regulation, other executive malfunctions, and lack of satisfying social experiences.
First, multiples VR tools are interesting for assessment and ADHD treatment: AULA test, for example, is a VR Test emulating faithfully the context of a real classroom and enhances one of the main features that differentiate it from other CPT-paradigm based tests, which is the inclusion of ecological distractors similar to the ones a child might find in a real classroom (Camacho-Conde & Climent, 2020; Diaz-Orueta, Iriarte, Climent, & Banterla, 2012; Zulueta, Díaz-Orueta, Crespo-Eguilaz, & Torrano, 2019). Research has also obtained relevant results with education and training tools to improve behavior and cognitive function in children with ADHD (Bashiri, Ghazisaeedi, & Shahmoradi, 2017; Shema-Shiratzky et al., 2019; Shiri, Tenenbaum, Sapir-Budnero, & Wexler, 2014). These VR tools can be combined with other therapeutic software, for example AKL-T01 (Kollins et al., 2020).
Second, we can argue the same for ASD. The most important conclusions of recent reviews for ASD and VR are: works are framed in the intervention of a) the communicative and social dimension, b) eye contact and facial expression, c) cognitive processes and learning, d) vocabulary and other applications. The results of the different works are still inconclusive about the effectiveness of the intervention through the VR, so it is necessary to conduct research with larger groups, make comparisons with a control group and make longitudinal follow-ups (Alcañiz, Olmos-Raya, & Abad, 2019; Delgado-Reyes, Ocampo Parra, & Sánchez López, 2020).
Finally, this manual describes different Psious’ general tools that can be used to help Healthcare professionals on assessment and treatment for neurodevelopmental disorders. At this moment Psious tools are not specifically designed for NDD assessment and/or treatment.