A Virtual Reality Simulator to Detect Acrophobia in Work-at-Height Situations

We propose to demonstrate a novel immersive virtual reality simulator aimed at detecting whether potential workers at height are able to climb high up for dangerous operations. Our simulator consists in a dynamic platform that simulates the vibrations of an aerial device during elevation, a real ladder synchronized in position with a virtual one placed on top of a virtual electric pole, a harness that allows users safely climbing the ladder and a head-mounted display (HMD) for visualization. Our demonstration invites users to experience a high fidelity work-at-height situation triggering fear of heights.Enedis Bourgogn

WoaH: A Virtual Reality Work-at-Height Simulator

We present WoaH, a virtual reality work-at-height simulator aimed at (i) testing whether future workers are able to manage their stress when high up and thus easily detect susceptibility to vertigo, and (ii) training in a typical work-at-height engineering operation. The simulator is composed of a real ladder synchronized in position with a virtual one placed 11 meters above the ground in a virtual environment. Visualization is done through a head-mounted display (HMD). We conducted a first user study evaluating our simulator in terms of cybersickness, perceived realism and anxiety, through both subjective (questionnaires) and objective (electrodermal activity) measurements, and testing whether vibratory cues could enhance the level of anxiety felt. Results indicate thatWoaH generates anxiety as expected and is perceived as realistic. Adding vibrations had significant impact on the perceived realism but not on the electro-dermal activity. These first results bring insights to future developments for a deployment in companies dealing with work at height.Enedis Bourgogn

Pengembangan Sistem Realitas Virtual pada Perangkat Mobile untuk Terapi Acrophobia Menggunakan Teknologi Google Cardboard

Acrophobia atau yang biasa disebut fobia ketinggian merupakan fobia tingkah laku yang cukup banyak diderita. Salah satu upaya penyembuhannya dilakukan melalui Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT). Pengembangan sistem VRT harus menerapkan metode terapi dan lingkungan virtual yang benar sesuai dengan prinsip-prinsip terapi dalam dunia psikologi. Tujuan dari pembuatan tugas akhir ini adalah untuk menerapkan sistem VRT dengan metode desensitisasi sistematis pada terapi fobia ketinggian yang memanfaatkan teknologi Unity dan Google Card Board untuk digunakan pada perangkat smartphone Android. Perancangan dan implementasi sistem virtual menjadikan pasien penderita fobia ketinggian sebagai sumber utama penelitian dengan pengarahan langsung oleh psikolog. Hasil pengujian dari sisi fungsionalitas dan secara klinis menunjukkan bahwa terapi fobia ketinggian dengan memanfaatkan sistem VRT dapat memberikan pengaruh psikologis terhadap pasien untuk selanjutnya dilakukan terapi secara intensif. =========================================================================================================== Acrophobia or so-called phobia of heights is a sufficiently suffered phobia. One of the healing efforts is done through Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT). The development of the VRT system must apply therapeutic methods and a real virtual environment in accordance with the principles of therapy in the psychological world. The goal of this final project is to apply the VRT system with systematic desensitization method on the phobia of heights therapy utilizing Unity technology and Google Card Board to be used on Android smartphone devices. The design and implementation of virtual systems make patients with the acrophobia as the main source of research with direct guidance by psychologists. The results of testing in terms of functionality and clinically indicate that elevation phobia therapy by utilizing the VRT system can provide psychological effects on patients for further intensive therapy

Programación de un entorno virtual interactivo para Oculus Rift

Este proyecto se ha realizado con la intención principal de experimentar con las nuevas tecnologías que hay a nuestro alcance en el campo de los entornos virtuales y a su vez descubrir un nuevo mundo de posibilidades en la interacción virtual con la Realidad Virtual. Por otra parte, hemos querido que nuestro proyecto se oriente hacia el ámbito de la e-salud y, más concretamente, hacia los tratamientos de algunos trastornos psicológicos y de la conducta, utilizando tecnologías de RV

Virtual Reality and Anxiety Disorders Treatment: Evolution and Future Perspectives

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that allows the simulation of different real-life situations on a tridimensional computer-generated environment where the user can interact with the environment as if he/she were the real world. VR has potential as an exposure technique for treating anxiety disorders because VR and real objects have similar characteristics, which creates the illusion that the user is immersed and engaged with objects in the real world. Regarding the efficacy of using virtual reality exposure-based therapy (VR-EBT), for more than two decades, there has been sufficient empirical evidence regarding VR-EBT for treating anxiety disorders. Finally, this chapter ends with some directions and perspectives for future VR-EBT developments and treatments protocols

VirtualMindTrial: An Intelligent Questionnaire System for Clinical Trail Recruitment

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on January 20, 2011.Dissertation advisor: Yugyung Lee.Vita.Includes bibliographic references (pages 76-80).Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2010.The recruitment of human subjects for clinical trials research is a critically important step in the discovery of new cures for diseases. Volunteers are subjected to an elaborate questionnaire process in current recruitment methodologies. Although the questionnaire process is extremely important in clinical trial recruitment, it is inefficient due to redundancy and lack of a systematic approach. Ideally, questionnaire generation and implementation must be guided by intelligent heuristics that minimize redundancy and inconsistency. In this thesis, an intelligent approach to questionnaire flow called VirtualMindTrial is proposed. Given a set of textual inclusion/exclusion clinical trial eligibility criteria and data available from diverse sources such as Microsoft HealthVault, VirtualMindTrial is able to 1) filter known criteria, 2) add associative criteria based on selected criteria, 3) form a neighborhood of patients who satisfy similar criteria, and 4) generate a dynamic questionnaire flow for screening patients. The questionnaire has been implemented using a visual 3-D environment to help volunteer subjects experience a realistic screening process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in terms of dynamic questionnaire flow generation and in enhancing the user experience with virtual worlds. A visual prototype system has been developed as part of the thesis to illustrate the enhanced efficiency and quality of screening patients with psychiatric disorders for clinical research.Abstract -- Illustrations -- Tables -- List of Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Related Work -- VirtualMindTrial Framework -- VirtualMindTrial System Architecture -- VirtualMindTrial Interface -- Evaluation -- Conclusion and Future Work -- References -- Vita

Diseño de un entorno virtual interactivo para OculusRift

Este proyecto se ha realizado con la intención principal de experimentar con las nuevas tecnologías que hay a nuestro alcance en el campo de los entornos virtuales y a su vez descubrir un nuevo mundo de posibilidades en la interacción virtual con la Realidad Virtual. Por otra parte, se ha dirigido a ser un proyecto con posibilidades de darle alguna aplicación beneficiosa, de no sólo un mero entretenimiento, enfocándola al campo de la e-salud, más específicamente en el tratamiento de fobias obteniendo así más conocimientos y no limitándose a una realización de un producto lúdico

A Framework for Prediction in a Fog-Based Tactile Internet Architecture for Remote Phobia Treatment

Tactile Internet, as the next generation of the Internet, aims to transmit the modality of touch in addition to conventional audiovisual signals, thus transforming today’s content-delivery into skill-set delivery networks, which promises ultra-low latency and ultra reliability. Besides voice and data communication driving the design of the current Internet, Tactile Internet enables haptic communications by incorporating 5G networks and edge computing. A novel use-case of immersive, low-latency Tactile Internet applications is haptic-enabled Virtual Reality (VR), where an extremely low latency of less than 50 ms is required, which gives way to the so-called Remote Phobia treatment via VR. It is a greenfield in the telehealth domain with the goal of replicating normal therapy sessions with distant therapists and patients, thereby standing as a cost-efficient and time-saving solution. In this thesis, we consider a recently proposed fog-based haptic-enabled VR system for remote treatment of animal phobia consisting of three main components: (1) therapist-side fog domain, (2) core network, and (3) patient-side fog domain. The patient and therapist domains are located in different fog domains, where their communication takes place through the core network. The therapist tries to cure the phobic patient remotely via a shared haptic virtual reality environment. However, certain haptic sensation messages associated with hand movements might not be reached in time, even in the most reliable networks. In this thesis, a prediction model is proposed to address the problem of excessive packet latency as well as packet loss, which may result in quality-of-experience (QoE) degradation. We aim to use machine learning to decouple the impact of excessive latency and extreme packet loss from the user experience perspective. For which, we propose a predictive framework called Edge Tactile Learner (ETL). Our proposed fog-based framework is responsible for predicting the zones touched by the therapist’s hand, then delivering it immediately to the patient-side fog domain if needed. The proposed ETL builds a model based on Weighted K-Nearest Neighbors (WKNN) to predict the zones touched by the therapist in a VR phobia treatment system. The simulation results indicate that our proposed predictive framework is instrumental in providing accurate and real-time haptic predictions to the patient-side fog domain. This increases patient’s immersion and synchronization between multiple senses such as audio, visual and haptic sensory, which leads to higher user Quality of Experience (QoE)

Telesaúde no ensino e pesquisa em psicologia clínica

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção.Este estudo teve por objetivo analisar o processo de difusão telesaúde, compreendida como a incorporação da informática e telecomunicações para prestação de serviços de saúde, entre professores e pesquisadores de psicologia da área clínica de cursos de graduação reconhecidos pelo MEC na região sul do Brasil. Utilizou-se o modelo de difusão de inovações de Rogers (2003), identificando: atributos percebidos nas inovações, estágio do processo de adoção, características do sistema social e participação da população estudada no desenvolvimento de inovações em telesaúde. A coleta de dados foi feita através de questionário fechado, enviado e respondido por meio eletrônico. Os recursos em fase de implementação são Bases de Dados e Publicações Eletrônicas (utilizados por 95% e 100% respectivamente) para acesso à informação e pesquisa científica. Sites de apoio psicológico e psicoeducacionais são conhecidos, mas não utilizados. Os canais de comunicação de massa (internet e publicações científicas) e os canais interpessoais (contatos informais e eventos em psicologia) são importantes fontes de informação para as inovações adotadas. As principais crenças associadas à telesaúde são: ausência de estudos significativos (76%), impessoalidade (68%), melhor acesso à pesquisa (60%), dificuldade de garantir sigilo (56%), e acesso à informação para a população. A falta de interesse pelo conhecimento e pesquisa na área refletiu um sistema tradicional que não percebe possíveis vantagens nas inovações e com valores incompatíveis com a adoção da telesaúde para prestação de serviços clínicos

Development of a novel virtual environment for assessing cognitive function. Design, Development and Evaluation of a Novel Virtual Environment to Investigate Cognitive Function and Discriminate between Mild Cognitive Impairment and Healthy Elderly.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is neurodegenerative disorder that causes memory loss and cognitive dysfunction. It affects one in five people over the age of 80 and is distressing for both sufferers and their families. A transitional stage between normal ageing and dementia including AD is termed a mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Recent studies have shown that people with MCI may convert to AD over time although not all MCI cases progress to AD. Much research is now focussing on early detection of AD and diagnosing an MCI that will progress to AD to allow prompt treatment and disease management before the neurons degenerate to a stage beyond repair. Hence, the ability to obtain a method of identifying MCI is of great importance. Virtual reality plays an important role in healthcare and offers opportunities for detection of MCI. There are various studies that have focused on detection of early AD using virtual environments, although results remain limited. One significant drawback of these studies has been their limited capacity to incorporate levels of difficulty to challenge users' capability. Furthermore, at best, these studies have only been able to discriminate between early AD and healthy elderly with about 80% of overall accuracy. As a result, a novel virtual simulation called Virtual Reality for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease (VREAD) was developed. VREAD is a quick, easy and friendly tool that aims to investigate cognitive functioning in a group of healthy elderly participants and those with MCI. It focuses on the task of following a route, since Topographical Disorientation (TD) is common in AD. An investigation was set up with two cohorts: non-elderly and elderly participants. The findings with regard to the non-elderly are important as they represent a first step towards implementation with elderly people. The results with elderly participants indicate that this simulation based assessment could provide a method for the detection of MCI since significant correlations between the virtual simulation and existing neuropsychological tests were found. In addition, the results proved that VREAD is comparable with well-known neuropsychological tests, such as Cambridge Neuropsychological Automated Test Battery, Paired Associate Learning (CANTAB PAL) and Graded Naming Test (GNT). Furthermore, analysis through the use of machine learning techniques with regard to the prediction of MCI also obtained encouraging results. This novel simulation was able to predict with about 90% overall accuracy using weighting function proposed to discriminate between MCI and healthy elderly.Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia and University Sultan Zainal Abidin, Malaysia (UNisZa