Development of the Measuring System for the Executive Functions in a Virtual Kitchen Environment

Abstract

Objective: The aim is to develop a system that can measure the executive functions in daily life away from the classical executive functions measurement system. Background: The Tower of London test, one of the classics of executive functions tests, is mainly used to measure planning. Although it is available for all ages and has the advantage of being able to analyze various factors, it also has the same disadvantages as many accompanying sub-tests. Thus, we improved and developed a Measuring System for the Executive Functions in Virtual Kitchen Environment. Design: The system has a scenario like "You have to clean up the kitchen before your friend comes.!" On the kitchen table is a post-it with the name of the kitchenware, and various kitchenware. Users should clean up the kitchen as soon as possible and ticktack sounds are played to make the situation aware. The Data collect the number of movements (grab, release times), the time is taken, the moving distance in the kitchen, data on the trajectory of the hand, and the number of matches between words and objects. Results: An expert evaluation was conducted. The advantage of being able to measure planning in daily life from a medical perspective and the proper VR environment setting from an HCI perspective have been verified. Conclusion: Development of the measuring system for the executive functions in a virtual kitchen environment is of significance to be able to measure executive functions based on actual daily life. Application: This work was supported by Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion(IITP) grant funded by the Korean Government(MSIP) (No. 2019-0-01569, Development of VR and IoT-based Systems for Evaluation of Embodied Cognition)