FRANCISCO CARRASCO GIRBÉS

PUBLICATIONS

USING VR TO IMPROVE PHOBIAS’ TREATMENT

CIET - VALENCIA 16-17th June

Virtual reality allows users to experience aspects of real life in a controlled environment, giving them the feeling of being protected as their body is not "in danger". It is therefore a great technology to expose people suffering from phobias (Witte et al., 2020), (Pouliadou, 2017) (Hilty et al., 2020). According to some studies, even a real exposure shows a high efficacy, people often prefer VR treatment to exposure to their fears, rather than therapy (Zimmer et al., 2021). The main objective of this project is to study the evolution and their progress treating their phobia. To do this, we created a VR project where from the exposure we gather important information such as age, gender, phobia level sent to a backend that stores it in a database where it will be treated and analyzed. This project consists of an immersive experience in VR, in which users have the possibility to face their agoraphobia with the level of exposure required from the patient with the possibility to be scaled along the session by the psychologist from the companion App that he/she will be using. All the information collected will provide us with relevant information to determine the level of anxiety of the users when facing their fears, carrying out case studies to improve this type of experience. This project has been developed to be used with Oculus, but with the possibility of being integrated with other devices.