Abstract
Rates of mental health disorders among adolescents and younger adults are on the rise [19] with the lack of widespread access remaining a critical issue [9]. It has been shown that teletherapy, defined as therapy delivered remotely with the use of a phone or computer system [20], may be a viable option to replace in-person therapy in situations where in-person therapy is not possible [21]. This research seeks to address the need for mental health therapy in situations where patients do not have access to traditional in-person care. This research investigates the use of Augmented Reality (AR) technology to provide a similar experience to in-person care while remaining remote. AR is an innovative technology that allows for virtual “holograms” to appear in the real world, blending the real and virtual worlds together. Exploratory research was focused on creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that could facilitate the basic level interaction between two or more users in a virtual space. By doing so, this paper served as a formative step toward developing AR teletherapy prototypes for larger scale studies. A user study was also conducted at a mid-size university (N = 48) to solicit opinions on AR technology as it relates to mental health therapy.
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Notes
- 1.
Virtual Reality is defined as an entirely virtual, immersive environment while Augmented Reality is a variation of VR that allows the user to see the both the real and virtual worlds [2].
- 2.
This is done by casting a ray in the direction of the gaze until it hits an object. The first object the ray hits is recorded as the object the user is looking at, but due to pupil dilation, the user may be focused on another object in that direction. The HoloLens 2 cannot sense pupil dilation.
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Chagnon, C., Backer, J., Djamasbi, S. (2022). Innovation in Shared Virtual Spaces for Mental Health Therapy. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M., Ntoa, S. (eds) HCI International 2022 Posters. HCII 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1583. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06394-7_49
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