Instrument design
The potential value of virtual environments in rehabilitation
Lehman, L. A.
Journal of Mobile Technology in Rehabilitation 4:3 October, 2015
Virtual Reality is a “computer-generated, immersive, interactive simulation”. How do rehabilitation activities performed in a virtual environment compare with activities in the real world? The object of this paper is to create a pathway to test rehabilitation virtual environments for internal and external validity, compared to real world activities.
Face validity helps to determine that an assessment is evaluating what it is expected to be testing. This is done by first polling clinicians and experts using focus groups, surveys and meetings. Then end users can be asked how accurate the assessments are. External validity is the degree to which a test can be generalized. It is necessary to establish that a task completed in the virtual reality environment is similar to results in a real environment. Here, the same results in virtual and ‘real’ settings would see how well the virtual tasks mimic the real life activities.