Exploring the Feasibility of EMG Based Interaction for Assessing Cognitive Capacity in Virtual Reality

With the growth and aging of the world population, the prevalence of cognitive diseases and disabilities like dementia and mild cognitive impairments increases. To determine the influence of such diseases, find therapeutic effects and further improve quality of life, cognitive assessment and training is required. This can be done with the application of high immersive technologies like virtual reality.In this paper we evaluate the feasibility of an electromyography (EMG) arm muscle-motion based interaction technique for controlling a VR cognitive performance diagnostic and training environment. Therefore, we compared the state-of-theart controller input to our EMG based approach in terms of presence and user experience.Results show significant differences in terms of Novelty and Dependability. Since there are only few significant differences regarding presence and user experience, the advantage of applying a more demanding physical motion interaction approach (EMG), seems to be a promising method with the potential of having a positive effect on the cognitive training progress. This is mainly caused by the fact that the implemented gesture interaction reinforces the connection between decision making and action execution.