A Virtual-Reality System Integrated With Neuro-Behavior Sensing for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Intelligent Assessment

Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity disorder(ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder among children. Traditional assessment methods generally rely on behavioral rating scales (BRS) performed by clinicians, and sometimes parents or teachers. However, BRS assessment is time consuming, and the subjective ratings may lead to bias for the evaluation. Therefore, the major purpose of this study was to develop a Virtual Reality (VR) classroom associated with an intelligent assessment model to assist clinicians for the diagnosis of ADHD. In this study, an immersive VR classroom embedded with sustained and selective attention tasks was developed in which visual, audio, and visual-audio hybrid distractions, were triggered while attention tasks were conducted. A clinical experiment with 37 ADHD and 31 healthy subjects was performed. Data from BRS was compared with VR task performance and analyzed by rank-sum tests and Pearson Correlation. Results showed that 23 features out of total 28 were related to distinguish the ADHD and non-ADHD children. Several features of task performance and neuro-behavioral measurements were also correlated with features of the BRSs. Additionally, the machine learning models incorporating task performance and neuro-behavior were used to classify ADHD and non-ADHD children. The mean accuracy for the repeated cross-validation reached to 83.2%, which demonstrated a great potential for our system to provide more help for clinicians on assessment of ADHD.