Development of Unilateral Spatial Neglect Treatment Support System that Promotes Attentional Disengagement and Movement

Abstract

Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is the failure to report, respond, or orient to novel or meaningful stimuli that are presented on the side opposite to a brain lesion. It is often associated with stroke and is more severe following right hemisphere damage. In this study, we introduced a movable slit USN rehabilitation system to promote concurrent attentional disengagement from stimuli ipsilateral to the lesion and attentional movement to the side contralateral to the lesion. Ten patients with USN received the intervention, and a "Pre-Post" design was used to assess the effects of the system. The outcome measurements included two exploration tasks (i.e., exploration of randomly structured multiple object arrays) and two bisection tasks (i.e., focusing attention on the horizontal extent of a single specific object). The results showed significant improvements in the exploration tasks, but not in the bisection tasks. These findings suggest the possibility that the movable slit system could improve the exploration ability in patients with USN.