Mental disorders and neurological conditions affect to at least 20% of worldwide population during lifetime. NESPLORA has developed VRMIND, a new ICT system for the evaluation of a range of mental disorders, based on the use of virtual reality (VR) environments. This technology is characterised by the ability to develop, clinically validate and perform innovative diagnosis procedures that simply cannot be done up to now. The patient, wearing virtual reality glasses and headphones, is introduced in different virtual environments specifically designed to diagnose a family of mental disorders. These virtual environments put the patient through multiple expected and unexpected stimuli, propose to execute different actions and ask to respond different questions. At the same time the system monitors the reactions of the patient and registers multiple variables. This technology reaches a 93,5% accuracy, a 95,2% sensitivity and a 91,9% specify, wide over the 75% accuracy offered by the conventional testing methods and other computerized tests not including a VR component. This high accuracy comes from the high ecologic validity that VRMIND has demonstrated in the clinical studies held up to now. Furthermore, the testing capacities of VRMIND allow not only the extremely accurate diagnose of mental conditions but also is able to determine the intensity of the mental conditions, a capacity that conventional tests cannot develop due to limitations in their capacity to gather and correlate enough data. This measuring capacity allows the practitioner to design the specific treatment needed by each patient instead of prescribing a standard treatment to all patients above condition thresholds either they are in the borderline or they are an extreme case.
The overall objective of this project is the demonstration, clinically and in the market, of the higher performance of virtual reality environment based diagnosis systems for mental disorders. This will be mainly done through the execution of the clinical studies and the development of normative studies for the homologation of VRMIND in front of the medical and practitioner collectives of Europe, USA and Latin America.
