The Design and Implementation of a Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy System for Patients Suffer from Paranoia

The Design and Implementation of a Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy System for Patients Suffer from Paranoia

Isnanda, R.G.

Neerincx, M. (mentor)
Brinkman, W.P. (mentor)
Veling, W. (mentor)

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Mediamatics

Computer Science - The Media & Knowledge Engineering Track

2013-07-16

Paranoia is described as state of mind where the subject has an unfounded belief that other people will, intentionally, cause him a harm. Being suspicious is not a bad thing. In certain circumstances, being suspicious is often encouraged because it is really helpful in maintaining safety. However, when this suspicion is exaggerated or unfounded, it becomes unhealthy. In the worst case scenario, people may start avoiding social contact and spend more time worrying about their unfounded fear. This is the case of paranoia that needs to be treated. Various methods have been proposed to treat paranoia. This research focused on designing and implementing a Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) system to treat paranoia where the patients were exposed to various stressors in a simulated virtual environment. Throughout the design and development process of the application, this research followed a Situated Cognitive Engineering (sCE) approach by collaboratively working with the therapists on finding out how VRET system could be extended to treat patients suffer from paranoia. By the end of the research, a prototype of the application was developed. The prototype accommodated prolonged exposure approach where patients are exposed to certain level of stressors for a prolonged time. The stressors are exposed as random paranoid thought provoking events that were triggered based on its probability and its rate of timer. Throughout the exposure, the patients main task is to reduce their anxiety level and not to avoid the situation, while the therapist aims to control the patients’ anxiety level within certain bandwidth by changing the probability and the rate of the random events. Throughout the research, two experiment were conducted. The first experiment aimed to examine if priming can induce paranoid thought in non-clinical population. The result suggested that priming can indeed increase paranoid thought comments in the non-clinical group that would less often exhibit paranoid thought. The second experiment aimed to examine if controlling the rate of the random event and its probability can evoke and control the paranoid thought. The result suggested that probability had significant main effect in evoking and controlling paranoid thought and there was interaction effect between the rate and the probability of the random events.

paranoia
prolonged exposure
virtual reality exposure therapy
mental health computing

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:aec34e9d-a436-4631-b7ff-5563a99b73c0

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Isnanda, R.G.