Virtual Reality and Wearable Technologies to Support Adaptive Responding of Children and Adolescents With Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Critical Comment and New Perspectives

摘要

Children and adolescents with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) are commonly describedas cognitively, socially, emotionally, and communicatively impaired. Usually, attention deficitshyperactivity disorders (ADHD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and cerebral palsy (CP) areincluded. Furthermore, learning difficulties are observed, and academic failures are documented(Rey-Casserly et al., 2019). Additionally, their chronic clinical conditions may represent a relevantburden for both caregivers and families, next to a significant threat for their health and a costfor medical services (Hickie et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2019). Covid-19 pandemic dramaticallyand suddenly exacerbated their fragile health conditions due to unavailability of medical orrehabilitative services and preventive measures such as quarantine and social distancing (Ehrleret al., 2021; Jaffee, 2021; Masi et al., 2021). In fact, their quality of life may be seriouslyhampered and both caregivers and families’s burden may drastically increase (Dhiman et al., 2020;Townsend, 2020; Farajzadeh et al., 2021; Zimmer et al., 2021). Technology-aided options providethe opportunity to independently administrate and self-regulate useful interventions for bothassessment and rehabilitative purposes (Rahman et al., 2020). Beside assistive technology-basedprograms (Stasolla and Bottiroli, 2020), one may envisage the use of virtual reality setups (VR)and/or wearable technologies (WT) (Vona et al., 2020).