Immersive Phobia Therapy through Adaptive Virtual Reality and Biofeedback

Abstract

Phobias are a type of anxiety disorder characterized by severe fear of objects and situations. In recent years, virtual reality exposure therapy has emerged as a safer and more convenient method of treating phobias, with the same rate of success as classical therapy, the in vivo exposure to stimuli. Following extensive research concerning the available technologies and after studying the state of the art in the field, we developed the PhoVR (Phobia therapy through Virtual Reality) system during a 2-year long project that involved the participation of a technical university, a biology faculty, and an industry partner specialized in designing 3D applications. Our final prototype incorporates scenarios for acrophobia, claustrophobia, and fear of public speaking therapy, in which the user is required to perform gamified tasks and navigate virtual reality environments with biophysical data acquisition (electrodermal activity and heart rate), automatic anxiety level classification, biofeedback integrated into the scenes’ elements, the dynamic adaptation of the virtual environments, and relaxation techniques made available at any moment. The control panel is an application dedicated to psychotherapists for managing patients’ profiles and therapy sessions. The feedback obtained in a qualitative survey with subjects and psychotherapists who evaluated the prototype validated the system and provided suggestions for refinement.