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Time to Get Personal: Individualised Virtual Reality for Mental Health

Published: 25 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Mental health conditions pose a major challenge to healthcare providers and society at large. Early intervention can have significant positive impact on a person's prognosis, particularly important in improving mental health outcomes and functioning for young people. Virtual Reality (VR) in mental health is an emerging and innovative field. Recent studies support the use of VR technology in the treatment of anxiety, phobia, eating disorders, addiction, and pain management. However, there is little research on using VR for supporting, treatment and prevention of depression - a field that is very much emerging. There is also very little work done in offering individualised VR experience to users with mental health issues. This paper proposes iVR, a novel individualised VR for improving users' self-compassion, and in the long run, their positive mental health. We describe the concept, design, architecture and implementation of iVR and outline future work. We believe this contribution will pave the way for large-scale efficacy testing, clinical use, and potentially cost-effective delivery of VR technology for mental health therapy in future.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '20: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2020
4474 pages
ISBN:9781450368193
DOI:10.1145/3334480
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 25 April 2020

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Author Tags

  1. depression
  2. individualisation
  3. mental health
  4. self-compassion
  5. user experience
  6. user models
  7. virtual reality

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