XR and Digital Experiences for Rehabilitation: Motivation, Engagement, Performance and Experience

Extended Reality (XR), encompassing virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, is increasingly adopted in rehabilitation to enhance treatment effectiveness through immersive, adaptive, and motivating environments. Beyond motor and cognitive outcomes, successful XR-based rehabilitation critically depends on psychological factors such as motivation, engagement, emotional regulation, and perceived experience. At the same time, XR systems enable multimodal data acquisition, including behavioral metrics and neurophysiological signals such as EEG and MRI, offering unprecedented opportunities for objective, continuous, and ecologically valid assessment of psychological, behavioral, and physiological processes. However, the rapid technological development has outpaced the establishment of standardized, quantitative measures capable of capturing both subjective psychological processes and their underlying neural and physiological correlates within rehabilitation contexts.The goal of this Research Topic is to advance quantitative psychological and psychophysiological approaches for the assessment of motivation, engagement, performance, and user experience in XR-based rehabilitation. We aim to address the current fragmentation between self-report measures, behavioral metrics, and neurophysiological data by promoting integrative measurement models that link subjective experience with objective markers derived from EEG, MRI, heart rate, electrodermal activity, and other physiological signals. Recent advances in XR technology, wearable neuroimaging, and signal processing enable continuous, ecologically valid measurement during rehabilitation tasks. However, challenges remain in terms of construct validity, reliability, sensitivity, and interpretability of these data. This Research Topic seeks to foster interdisciplinary contributions that develop, validate, or apply quantitative methods and measurement models to capture psychological mechanisms and neural dynamics in rehabilitation settings, ultimately improving personalized intervention design and evaluation.This Research Topic welcomes original research articles, methodological papers, and reviews addressing quantitative assessment in XR-based rehabilitation. Studies may involve diverse populations and may explore psychological, behavioral, and/or physiological aspects of XR-based rehabilitation. Submissions should emphasize methodological rigor, theoretical grounding, and relevance to quantitative psychology and measurement.Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following: • measurement and/or validation of motivation, engagement, workload, and user experience in immersive rehabilitation; • integration of self-report, behavioral, performance-based and physiological metrics; • EEG- and MRI-based markers of cognitive, emotional, and motor processes; • multimodal psychophysiological assessment; • serious games and gamified rehabilitation systems, with attention to game mechanics as drivers of user experience; • development or collection of quantitative indicators and objective markers derived from XR, EEG, and psychophysiological data; • individual differences influencing XR rehabilitation experiences. Topic editors: Marta Mondellini, Alfonso Mastropietro, John Henry Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80037/xr-and-digital-experiences-for-rehabilitation-motivation-engagement-performance-and-experience