Projects

Project Description: Prior work suggests that practicing functional everyday activities can enhance real-world performance, an approach often described as ecologically valid practice. However, implementing realistic practice in everyday environments is often difficult and may pose safety risks, particularly for individuals with dementia, who may be vulnerable to injury. Virtual reality (VR) has been proposed as a promising solution to this challenge by enabling safe, repeatable simulations of everyday activities. 

Despite this promise, little research has examined how VR environments should represent the meaningful daily lives of people with dementia, how interaction designs should be optimized for this population, or whether the routine use of VR programs can lead to meaningful improvements in engagement with everyday activities. 

To address these gaps, this project aims to: (1) understand how meaningful everyday activities for people with dementia should be represented in VR; (2) investigate how VR interactions can be optimized to support usability; and (3) evaluate whether the routine use of VR programs designed around these principles can improve functional performance and engagement in everyday activities among people with dementia. 

Publication:

• E. Babb, M. Jasim, C. D. Lee, and H.-T. Jung. "Defining Reality in Dementia VR: Stakeholder Perspectives on Ecological Validity for Functional Activity Training." In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI'26), 2026.

Project Description: A growing body of research suggests that current treadmill-based physical rehabilitation therapies reinforce movement patterns that differ from those used during overground walking, potentially limiting their therapeutic benefits for people with acquired brain injury. Despite this important limitation, both research and clinical practice have largely focused on rehabilitation approaches that do not closely replicate the biomechanics of everyday movement.

To address this gap, this project aims to: (1) understand how fully immersive VR programs should be designed for people with acquired brain injury to meet the rehabilitation goals and needs of both therapists and patients; (2) evaluate whether the routine use of these VR programs can improve functional performance in real-world settings beyond the clinic; and (3) identify design principles for VR-based physical rehabilitation programs through longitudinal use studies.

Publication:

• TBA

Project Description: To be added.

Publication:

• TBA