Virtual Reality Behavioral Therapy

Abstract

Mental health and substance abuse patients face many challenges in receiving effective long-term outpatient behavioral therapies, including issues related to accessibility and personalized care. Mobile health technologies, particularly those integrating virtual reality (VR), are increasingly becoming more accessible and affordable, thus providing a potential avenue to deploy outpatient behavioral therapy. This paper proposes a method to address the aforementioned challenges by personalizing and validating VR simulation content for behavioral therapy. An initial demonstration will be performed for tobacco cessation, which is a critical public health treatment area for mental illness and substance abuse. The method empirically builds smoker personas from theoretically grounded survey content. The personas are then used to design and pilot VR simulation modules tailored to behavioral interventions, which will be tested in the patient population. The VR simulation will record a subject’s emotions and brain activities in real-time through subjective (surveys) and objective (neurophysiology) measures of emotional response. The overall goal of the study is to validate the VR content by demonstrating that significant differences are seen in emotional response when presenting content personalized for the patient.

Identifying the Added Value of Virtual Reality for Treatment in Forensic Mental Health: A Scenario-Based, Qualitative Approach

“…VR has several advantages for mental healthcare. Among other things, it can increase treatment motivation of patients because they enjoy using the technology; ensure that the content and form of interventions are tailored to the needs of individual patients; decrease treatment costs because of higher efficiency; and facilitate therapy within a specific environment that cannot be accessed from a therapist’s office (Turner and Casey, 2014; Kim et al, 2016; Botella et al, 2017). These qualities make VR an especially appealing technology for psychological treatment, since mental health problems such as phobias, alcoholism or even extreme paranoia are closely intertwined with the perceived environment (World Health Organization, 2004; Freeman et al, 2017).…”

“…These gaps in knowledge cannot be filled by generalizing findings from studies on VR in other mental healthcare domains to forensic mental health because of its aforementioned unique characteristics. Especially when not much is known yet, VR applications for specific domains should be thoughtfully developed (Kim et al, 2016) to ensure that they fit the context, patients and therapists that will use it.…”

Clarifying the Concepts of Personalization and Tailoring: An Interview Study with Experts

“…Customization to those lifestyle pro les include feedback about lifestyle and the in-or exclusion of relevant content. The second vignette consists of a virtual reality behavior therapy for tobacco cessation (19) in which users are segmented in personas based on emotional response data. Customizations entail the use of either positive (i.e., cessation coach) or negative scenarios (i.e., receiving a diagnosis of emphysema).…”

Reconstructing Personal Stories in Virtual Reality as a Mechanism to Recover the Self

“…The focus on the many possible uses of VR as a treatment medium is expanding as various studies try to identify how the medium can be adapted to expand beyond mere exposure treatment and achieve significant cognitive restructuring and treatment results [32,63]. However, although many studies have emphasized the personalization of the treatment design [64,65], they do not necessarily employ conceptual frameworks regarding the diverse types of trauma in the case of disorders such as PTSD; in particular, they do not consider the narrative nature of the human self that plays a significant role in the interpretation of life events and hence forms a specific perception of reality and related health conditions.…”