Immerse Yourself in a Fight Against your Fears: A Vision for using Virtual Reality Serious Games and Physiology Assessment in Phobia Treatment
Diogo Martins, Martim Neves, Bernardo Marques, Susana Brás, José Maria Fernandes · 2023
The evolution and miniaturization of technology allows the development of portable solutions for physiology assessment, and the chance to mimic real world settings using Virtual Reality (VR). This work proposes an end-to-end framework for assisting Exposure Therapy (ET) with VR serious games and physiology monitoring. It relies on a generic architecture changing the VR stimuli, i.e., the phobia being considered, while the remaining modules can be re-used for data collection and analysis by a therapist team. It also integrates customizable bio-feedback, triggering specific events or adjusting the amount of stimuli based on the physiological response. The VR serious games were assessed with 16 participants before being integrated into the architecture. The framework’s capacity to acquire bio-signals and other metrics in a synchronous manner was evaluated in two user studies with a total of 23 participants.