Abstract
Many children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) perform poorly in their academic studies. They also have difficulties in their social lives due to a lack of interpersonal skills and this often continues into adult life. Appropriate early therapies and medications can be very beneficial. In this paper, we introduce and demonstrate the benefits of a new type of treatment, namely, an eye-contact game which successfully exploits mixed reality technology. None of the patients in our experiment were older than ten years of age. They were able to pay attention and sustain interest in the treatment sessions over a span of six weeks. After participating in the treatment sessions with our game, the omission/commission errors which were evaluated in an attention test taken by the experimental group decreased significantly and appeared within the normal range. In addition to the improvement in error rates, the mean response time to an interactive metronome test significantly decreased. Importantly, our game allows patients to conduct this treatment by themselves at home without professional assistance. To the best of our knowledge, this study is one of the first studies to use a mixed reality head-mounted display to treat children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and to prove its potential as a treatment for clinically diagnosed children.
Highlights
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM) [1] characterizes people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as those with elevated levels of hyperactive, impulsive, and inattentive behavior
We conducted the advanced test of attention (ATA) [34] with the participants; all of them were at the ADHD level because at least one out of the four variables of omission errors, commission errors, response times, and the standard deviation of the response times was more than 1.5 times the standard deviation (1.5σ ) of the mean
We conducted visual tests based on ATA and body group tests based on interactive metronome (IM) before and after the sessions
Summary
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders (DSM) [1] characterizes people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as those with elevated levels of hyperactive, impulsive, and inattentive behavior. A simple virtual reality program was used for the treatment of ten children with ADHD, and their omission/ commission errors decreased significantly compared with a control group [11]. Several theories have proven that there is a correlation between abnormal face recognition and difficulties in social interaction for children with ADHD [18]–[20]. People with ADHD tend to look around the periphery, such as mouth or nose, and this atypical attention pattern causes difficulties in face recognition [19], [20] Based on these theories, in this paper we introduce a Mixed Reality Head Mounted Display (MR HMD) based eye-contact training game as another intervention method that can enhance the attention and sociality of people with ADHD.
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