Towards immersive and adaptive augmented reality exposure treatment.

In this paper we introduce a novel augmented reality based exposure therapy system for phobia treatment. This allows patients to see virtual fear stimuli overlaid onto the real world and to fully interact with them in real time. Extending on previous work, we focus on creating a controllable and interactive system (through gesture recognition and physiological sensors) with a visually realistic context. Our goal is a very life-like system that allows full parameterization over stimulus intensity and other factors necessary for an effective exposure therapy system.

Virtual reality rehabilitation of spatial abilities after brain damage.

Current rehabilitation of navigation and spatial orientation ability after brain damage is generally focused on training within the rehabilitation hospital or the patient's home as part of common physio- and occupational therapy sessions. To further promote generalization of gained abilities and to quantify functional improvements, this project aims at developing a Virtual Reality (VR) application that can be used for training and assessment of spatial orientation and navigation skills in brain-damaged patients. The training is administered after the standard hospital rehabilitation training is completed. Additionally, the program will be used as an assessment tool to quantify the participants' wayfinding performance. The data will be compared with real-world navigation performance in tasks of similar complexity to evaluate real-world transfer of the VR training. Currently, the application is under development and basic functionality and data acquisition are being implemented.

Warning: subtle aspects of strategy assessment may affect correlations among spatial tests.

In this study, preliminary to a larger experiment, 42 participants completed four different spatial tests and, after each test, a strategy questionnaire. For half of the participants, visualizational strategies were presented first in this questionnaire, and for the other half, analytical strategies. The order of strategy descriptions had effects on the strategies reported and on the intercorrelations among the spatial tests and between the spatial tests and an inductive-reasoning test. In the group first presented with visualizational strategies, intercorrelations among the spatial tests were higher and correlations with the reasoning test were lower than in the group first presented with analytical strategies. Bootstrap analyses with 100 random splits of the sample confirmed this result. The findings are interpreted as indications of a priming effect by the strategy descriptions which affected the way participants dealt with subsequent tests. Implications for strategy assessment are discussed.