Background: Patients with vestibular loss have reduced wayfinding ability, but the association between vestibular loss and impaired steering spatial navigation is unclear.
Objective: To evaluate whether vestibular loss is associated with reduced steering navigation performance in a virtual reality (VR) environment containing obstacles.
Methods: 17 ambulatory adults with vestibular loss were age/sex-matched to healthy controls. Participants traversed a VR hallway with obstacles, and their navigation performance was compared using metrics such as collisions, time, total distance travelled, and speed in single and multivariate analysis.
Results: In univariate analysis there was no significant difference in collisions between vestibular patients and controls (1.84 vs. 2.24, p = 0.974). However, vestibular patients took more time, longer routes, and had lower speeds to complete the task (56.9 vs. 43.9 seconds, p < 0.001; 23.1 vs. 22.0 meters, p = 0.0312; 0.417 vs. 0.544 m/s, p < 0.001). These results were confirmed in multivariate analysis.
Conclusions: This study found that patients with vestibular loss displayed slower gait speeds and traveled longer distances, though did not make more collisions, during a VR steering navigation task. Beyond the known influence of vestibular function on gait speed, vestibular loss may also contribute to less efficient steering navigation through an obstacle-laden environment, through neural mechanisms that remain to be elucidated.
Keywords: Vestibular hypofunction; spatial navigation; vestibular dysfunction; virtual reality.