A Quantitative Assessment Method For The Attention Of ADHD Patients Based On Virtual Reality

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder(ADHD),a common neurodevelopmental disorder mainly occurs in children and adolescents.It is characterized by difficulty paying attention,hyperactivity and impulsivity,which can seriously affect children’s daily learning and life.At present,doctors mainly rely on clinical observation and rating scale to diagnose ADHD,where qualitative diagnosis accounts for a high proportion.It makes the results highly subjective.Due to the lack of objective and effective quantitative assessment methods for ADHD in clinical practice,it is easy to cause misdiagnosis or missed diagnosis in patients with mild symptoms.In recent years,virtual reality technology has made some achievements in the objective diagnosis of ADHD,however,the current diagnostic methods based on VR only focus on the results of the test,ignoring the information of the subjects’ hand movements during the test execution,therefore,quantitative evidence representing the core characteristics of ADHD patients cannot be provided.In this study,sensor technology is combined with VR technology to build a VR system for the quantitative evaluation of attention in ADHD patients.This system can quantitatively score the performance of ADHD patients according to the human hand movement data and rating scale,providing the basis for clinicians to objectively diagnose ADHD.The dominating research details of this thesis are summed up as follows:(1)To explore the feasibility of using the HTC Vive system to track the human hand movement data,two sets of experiments are designed to evaluate the accuracy and stability of the HTC Vive system in tracking and locating the position and rotation of the handheld controller in the virtual space.The experimental results show that the HTC Vive system can be used to collect human hand movement data,which lays a foundation for further quantifying the difference of hand movement between ADHD patients and normal children in virtual reality environment.(2)A quantitative attention assessment system for ADHD patients is constructed.The system is developed based on HTC Vive virtual reality equipment and Unity 3D engine,providing a virtual test based on schulte grid,real-time tracking of subjects’ hand movements during the test,and quantifying the degree of inattention and hyperactivity of subjects.(3)A method for measuring the comprehensive performance for the quantitative evaluation of ADHD patients has been proposed.In this method,kinematics parameters can be obtained by quantifying the difference of the hand movement data between ADHD patients and normal children.Furthermore,the kinematics parameters are analyzed with the rating scale score to get the evaluation indicators,which can be utilized to evaluate the characteristics of ADHD patients quantitatively.Then,principal component analysis are used to perform the evaluation indicators and establish a comprehensive performance score calculation algorithm.The experiment result shows that this method can distinguish ADHD patients from normal children effectively.