Publicação
Supporting Therapists in Authoring Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Children
| Resumo: | Throughout the years, anxiety disorders in children have become more prevalent, requiring tailored solutions to accompany this increase successfully. Although therapy exists, its two most common types, exposure through imagination and in vivo, have limitations associated with the maturity of children, high costs, and logistical problems. Virtual reality exposure therapy is becoming increasingly more common in the field, tackling some of the limitations raised by the other two approaches. Still, these VRET systems are often not developed with either the therapist or the children in mind, featuring confusing interfaces and situations that are too stereotypical and do not allow personalisation to their needs. In this thesis, we explore an approach where therapists can personalise the VR exposure therapy sessions to the needs of each child, being able to modify the VR scenarios directly in real-time. To do so, we developed VRTherapist, a VRET system that comprises two applications: a virtual reality application and a computer application. The virtual reality application allows the patient to immerse themselves in various environments, while the latter allows the therapist to control these environments directly with an interface. The development cycle featured informal meetings among the research team and therapists, which steered the development into a prototype ready for a study. This study gave us a lot of good feedback and suggestions towards current and new features that should be included, as well as understanding the current role of virtual reality in therapy as a bridge between imagination and in vivo exposure therapies. Finally, our VRTherapist system is easily expandable with new environments and features while being focused on the end-user. We also present a paradigm shift when designing VRET solutions: they should attend to patients’ and therapists’ needs from an interactivity and feature standpoint. Working clinicians should closely accompany development to build robust solutions. |
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| Autores principais: | Ferreira, João Pedro Pereira Lopes |
| Assunto: | realidade virtual terapia de exposição crianças distúrbios de ansiedade VRET Teses de mestrado - 2024 |
| Ano: | 2024 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | dissertação de mestrado |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Lisboa |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa |
| Resumo: | Throughout the years, anxiety disorders in children have become more prevalent, requiring tailored solutions to accompany this increase successfully. Although therapy exists, its two most common types, exposure through imagination and in vivo, have limitations associated with the maturity of children, high costs, and logistical problems. Virtual reality exposure therapy is becoming increasingly more common in the field, tackling some of the limitations raised by the other two approaches. Still, these VRET systems are often not developed with either the therapist or the children in mind, featuring confusing interfaces and situations that are too stereotypical and do not allow personalisation to their needs. In this thesis, we explore an approach where therapists can personalise the VR exposure therapy sessions to the needs of each child, being able to modify the VR scenarios directly in real-time. To do so, we developed VRTherapist, a VRET system that comprises two applications: a virtual reality application and a computer application. The virtual reality application allows the patient to immerse themselves in various environments, while the latter allows the therapist to control these environments directly with an interface. The development cycle featured informal meetings among the research team and therapists, which steered the development into a prototype ready for a study. This study gave us a lot of good feedback and suggestions towards current and new features that should be included, as well as understanding the current role of virtual reality in therapy as a bridge between imagination and in vivo exposure therapies. Finally, our VRTherapist system is easily expandable with new environments and features while being focused on the end-user. We also present a paradigm shift when designing VRET solutions: they should attend to patients’ and therapists’ needs from an interactivity and feature standpoint. Working clinicians should closely accompany development to build robust solutions. |
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