AR-Therapist: Design and Simulation of an AR-Game Environment as a CBT for Patients with ADHD

Abstract

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in which patients have difficulties related to inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Those patients are in need of a psychological therapy use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to enhance the way they think and behave. This type of therapy is mostly common in treating patients with anxiety and depression but also is useful in treating autism, obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. A major limitation of traditional CBT is that therapists may face difficulty in optimizing patients' neuropsychological stimulus following a specified treatment plan. Other limitations include availability, accessibility and level-of-experience of the therapists. Hence, this paper aims to design and simulate a generic cognitive model that can be used as an appropriate alternative treatment to traditional CBT, we term as "AR-Therapist." This model takes advantage of the current developments of augmented reality to engage patients in both real and virtual game-based environments.

A serious-gamification blueprint towards a normalized attention

“…In light of the rich literature, this paper will propose a blueprint that serves as generic reference model to test the validity of using an online immersive reality system that manifests behavior as an interplay between stimulation and response of actions as a CBT to feature qualities of intelligence, responsiveness, adaptiveness and precision. The previous works, presented in [51][52][53], stride implemented an augmented reality game environment using both Microsoft-HoloLens emulator 1 and Unity 2 to design a specialized test-bed for the system. The hypothesis tackled was that an increase in patient correct attention to choosing a predefined object contributes positively to their performance index which means they are following along with their treatment plan; the opposite should be true when they fail to achieve their assigned tasks.…”

“…The performance measure is case specific, and a single equation that determines it will not be proposed in this work, readers are directed to [54][55][56][57] for more details. For this, performances will be described at different levels in a game assuming that the game session will be able to measure them in every stage it goes through [51].…”

Effectiveness of Virtual Reality-Based Interventions for Children and Adolescents with ADHD: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Among neurodevelopmental disorders, one of the most common is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) [1]. It is characterized by the presence of a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that interferes with cognitive functioning and participation in different activities, at least during the last six months.…”

“…There are several systematic reviews of the use of technologies, both for assessment and intervention (serious games (SG), robots, virtual reality (VR), etc.) in children with neurodevelopmental disorders [1,[4][5][6][7]. However, there are no reviews or meta-analyses on the effectiveness of virtual-reality interventions in children with ADHD.…”

“…These contribute to improving the movements, actions, and emotions adapted to the context [8,12]. Recent developments in augmented reality (AR), which allows the adding of information and the superimposing of information on the real world, facilitate the transfer of learning to everyday life, and achieve a high level of relevance and motivation [1]. In the case of children, both VR and AR have been considered positive technologies, since they improve the quality of experience, motivation, and learning [10].…”