Veracity: low cost physiology assessment tool using virtual reality

• Autor(a) principal: Marques, Bernardo José Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/22731
• topic: Realidade virtual; Realidade aumentada; Fobias

Anxiety disorders affect many individuals, conditioning their daily life routines. Specific phobia is one example of an anxiety disorder, which is an irrational fear towards an object, or situation. Phobics felt a distorted reality, and usually try to avoid the phobic element, which will only intensify the problem. The evolution of technology and the miniaturization brought to the foreground not only allow the development of portable solutions for the assessment of psychological and behavior but also new possibility to mimic the real world likes Virtual Reality (VR) outside of the laboratory setting. Recent studies, describe Virtual Reality exposure as effective, when compared to in vivo exposure, with the benefit of being less aggressive to the phobic individual. In this dissertation, we propose Veracity, an affordable and portable system, which relies on VR to present more ecological and virtual stimuli to phobic individuals while monitoring their physiological and behaviour response. We used spider phobias as the main case study of our system. While presenting the VR stimuli, using a game divided in a set of increasing difficulty levels, Veracity allows the interaction with the virtual environment through hand gesture. Simultaneously the individual’s reaction is acquired (ECG, HR, RR, VIDEO, Screenshots, 3D objects tracking, etc.) using external resources and two smartphone applications. Veracity also supports data management for post processing integrated with the cloud. The gamification approach and its ability to customize the virtual stimuli provides enough versatility to foster its usefulness in clinical practice as a solution to monitor and elicit natural reactions from individuals with specific phobias.