After major earthquakes, many people suffer from posttraumatic symptoms (PTS) as well as anxiety and distress about ongoing aftershocks. Traditional treatments such as in vivo or imaginal exposure may be of limited applicability for earthquake-related symptoms while others such as cognitive behavioural therapy may not be short enough to deal with the many people needing rapid help after mass di...

Introduction: One of the consequences of life in today's society is the high prevalence of spinal cord injury, which happens for several reasons. Decreased mobility in these people causes premature fatigue and reduces their quality of life, which leads to diseases. This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of virtual reality-based rehabilitation exercises and reflexology in reducing the fat...

Presence, the psychological experience of “being there,” is an important construct to consider when investigating the impact of mediated experiences on cognition. Though several studies have investigated the influence of presence on the memory of virtual environments (i.e. recalling virtual objects), few have tested how presence impacts memory on subsequent tasks in the physical world. Thirty-t...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of game-based virtual reality movement therapy plus mental practice on upper extremity function in chronic stroke patients with hemiparesis. [Subjects] The subjects were chronic stroke patients with hemiparesis. [Methods] Thirty subjects were randomly assigned to either the control group or experimental group. All subjects recei...

Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) is one of the few interventions supported by randomized controlled trials for the treatment of combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in active duty service members. A comparative effectiveness study was conducted to determine if virtual reality technology itself improved outcomes, or if similar results could be achieved with a control exposu...

BACKGROUND In recent years, virtual reality has been introduced to neurorehabilitation, in particular with the intention of improving upper-limb training options and facilitating motor function recovery. METHODS/DESIGN The proposed study incorporates a quantitative part and a qualitative part, termed a mixed-methods approach: (1) a quantitative investigation of the efficacy of virtual reality...

Virtual reality (VR) offers today a new paradigm for human-computer interaction, in which users are no longer simply external observers of images on a computer screen, but active participants within a computer-generated three-dimensional world. Most of the psychological therapies carried out with the help of virtual reality rely on the principle of exposure. This review surveys the state of the...