Blended Learning for Dementia

Mental health care is characterized with diverse and complex illnesses that all have their own way of thinking and behaviour. One of the most important challenges for caregivers is to gain empathy and compassion for their patient’s complex behaviour, which is needed to build a healthy relationship with their patient(s)...Tinqwise and TMVRS aim to develop an innovative blended learning platform in this project, which focuses on the learning of ‘social cognitive skills’ instead of technical actions (such as in games or procedural trainings) during a VR experience. In order to achieve these social cognitive skills, the most important conditions are to realize interaction between the user (trainee) and the characters within the virtual environment. This requires a high level of facial animations and interaction that allows the user to experience a high variance of nuanced reactions from the virtual characters as natural behavior. ..The expected technical project results that are necessary to develop the blended learning platform are threefold:.1. The development of a “wrapping” tool that is able to quickly realize facial expressions in virtual reality, with the aim to increase a realistic social interaction between the user and the virtual characters, which is an important precondition to develop social cognitive skills. This interaction will take place using the mobile- and desktop VR application that will also be developed during this project..2. The development of a smartphone app that is able to collect both active data (gather data through actively asking the user questions) and passive data (automatic data collection) from a smartphone that enables the VR mobile- and desktop applications to use this data to improve their VR character’s interactive behaviour, which we call ‘adaptive VR’..3. The development of a performance evaluation module (PEM) that is able to measure the user’s performance during a VR training session, based on quantitative data from all three training tools. This integration provides the user a blended learning experience.