Grensing, Florian

Psychological trials, such as behavioural avoidance tests (BAT), are a fundamental part of the phobia therapeutic process. In order to link physiological reactions with specific points in time during psychological trials, it is necessary to integrate observation data with data collected automatically by sensors, such as wearable devices. To this end, this paper introduces FRAME - a framework for combining real-world events occurring during psychological trials with physiological data collected by wearables. FRAME consists of three parts, an Observation App, a data integration module and a Virtual Reality (VR) App. The Observation App captures events and their exact time of occurrence. The integration module links the observations with the respective physiological data, allowing an in-depth analysis of physiological reactions. The VR App provides a virtual scenario based on the BAT in vivo, thus enabling a BAT in virtuo. The practical applicability of FRAME is tested within a study comparing behavioural avoidance tests in vivo and in virtuo, assessing 25 patients with arachnophobia wearing an Empatica E4.

The field of virtual reality (VR) is no longer limited to the entertainment sector, and the use also increased in the sector of healthcare and therapy. This paper attempts to compare the effectiveness of a Behavioral Avoidance Test for spider phobia in virtual reality to in vivo. To do this, two different BAT approaches are designed for both in vivo and in virtuo to be compared by a group of phobic participants. In addition, physiological data of the participants were recorded to investigate this comparison on a physiological level.