Multiplayer implementation for the remote assistance in a Virtual Reality assessment tool and preventive intervention for Alzheimer’s disease

Since the end of the last century, one of the main fields of interest for the world of Virtual Reality (VR) has been its application in healthcare and medicine. Thanks to its nature, VR made easy to visualize complex stimuli in a controlled and secure environment. Recently this technology started to be more accessible to the public, gaining more and more importance and widespread availability. With this in mind, the PEDAL (Personalized Environment for Dementia Assisted Living) project has been developed and carried on by a group of researchers and students in order to develop a VR tool which would help in the assessment of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) patients and in the subsequent intervention. AD is the most common form of dementia, millions of people in the world are affected by it, and it affects for the largest part the elderly ones, thus becoming more and more common as the life expectancy increases. The underlying idea behind the PEDAL project is to detect early signals of disorientation and challenges in wayfinding in familiar urban areas, that have been discovered to be one of the earliest symptoms in people affected by dementia. This has been done through the development of an immersive virtual environment, modelled in order to resemble the city of Colchester, in which the patient can safely move while riding a stationary bike and wearing a Virtual Reality headset, while the medical staff can interact with them and measure its ability to orient themselves when given the task to reach a specified destination. The goal of this thesis is to present the choice of the most suitable networking system needed in the project in order to establish a remote connection between the patient and the clinical supervisor, thus reaching a further degree of freedom and flexibility in the usage of the VR tool. We can do that by exploring the most common multiplayer systems that are available in the Unity ecosystem, both proprietary and from third-party libraries. We studied how to smoothly integrate it with the current feature of the game to provide a simple yet effective experience to the end user.