Granés Fundació and the Girona Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBGI) sign the collaboration agreement for the 2nd Granés Fundació IDIBGI Grant, with the aim of promoting research in the field of disabilities and aspects of their improvement and prevention.
Specifically, the collaboration will allow for the hiring of a neuropsychologist who will join IDIBGI’s Neurodevelopmental Disorders research group. The research they will develop will be the study of the efficacy of immersive virtual reality in the treatment of specific phobias in people with autism spectrum disorder.
As a result of this agreement, Granés Fundació commits to making a financial contribution of 60,000 euros for the two planned years.
From a social perspective, in recent years, digital technologies have played an important role in reducing opportunity gaps, especially among members of disadvantaged and underrepresented communities, from assistive technologies that create independence for people with disabilities to learning platforms that provide access to educational opportunities. Technology is a valuable tool in its contribution to inclusion, if designed with these objectives in mind. Virtual reality can serve as a tool to help address biases, improve access to opportunities, and create collaborative experiences that can develop and enhance many key life skills.
Immersive Virtual Reality creates interactive computer-generated worlds that replace real-world sensory perceptions with digitally generated ones, producing the sensation of being in new, life-sized environments. IVR allows for such tight control over presented stimuli that therapeutic strategies can be implemented with precision; virtual reality can produce situations that can be therapeutically useful if used correctly, but are almost impossible to recreate in real life.
