Visually-induced dizziness
Balanceland is the new rehabilitation game for visually-induced dizziness, created by the Cardiff University Dizzy Lab.
VIsually-induced dizziness is when certain visual environments or features make people feel dizzy. It can occur, for example, in supermarkets, crowds or buildings with stripes and repeating patterns. It can also occur with motion stimuli, such as in films / TV / computer games, or traffic.
Visually-induced dizziness can occur in several conditions, including PPPD, vestibular migraine, Ménière’s disease and others. It can also occur to some degree in people without any vestibular condition.
What is Balance-Land?
Rehabilitation for visually-induced dizziness symptoms relies on desensitisation. This means exposing the person to situations that trigger their symptoms. Eventually, the brain will adjust and those situations will no longer trigger symptoms. It is important the situations that trigger symptoms are not too severe, so that rehabilitation can be tolerated and does not make people worse.
Balanceland simply makes this type of rehabilitation into a game, to make it a bit more fun and interesting and to provide some record of what you have achieved. It currently features three environments designed to be progressively more challenging: the desert, the park and the supermarket.
This means Balanceland is designed to trigger mild dizziness symptoms, which may make you feel unpleasant. But if the symptoms are too bad, you are attempting a level or a speed that is too challenging for you at the moment.
Balanceland has not yet gone through a formal clinical trial. It is based on established rehabilitation principles, and in a recent study, we found evidence that people who played the recommended time reported improved symptoms (see recent publications list). However that does not prove it works (it is possible those people might have been improving anyway). Or it might help for some people and not others. Visually-induced dizziness varies from person to person. Your vestibular clinician is best placed to advise on this.
If you decide to try it, please follow these guidelines:
- It is recommended to play about 10 minutes, twice a day if you can.
- Don’t stop doing any other rehabilitation your clinician has advised you to do.
- Start playing with the Desert level, which is the simplest.
- Start slowly, only increase speed when you are more confident you know how much your symptoms will be triggered.
- Aim to only trigger MILD symptoms. Doing too much too fast can be detrimental.
- If your symptoms are too intense, take a break. Try lowering the speed or a different environment.
What are the new features?
The new features that we are currently testing are:
- Urban Environment
- Separate Environments
- Drive mode (Urban Only)
- Numbers game mode (All)
- Pictures game mode (All)
- NPCs in the environment (All)