Virtual Reality Behavioral Therapy

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.