Time to Get Personal: Individualised Virtual Reality for Mental Health
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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VR has been widely used to treat a wide range of mental health conditions due to its potential to treat various mental health illnesses.
“Due to VR’s potential to treat various mental health illnesses, VR has been widely used to treat a wide range of mental health conditions [8,13].”
From Virtual Reality for Addressing Depression and Anxiety: A Bibliometric Analysis (2023) · cites this paper as [8]
Several VR interventions have recently been aimed at addressing mental health conditions and increasing the accessibility of mental health services.
“Several virtual reality (VR) interventions have recently been aimed at addressing mental health conditions and increasing the accessibility of mental health services to society [8,9,10,11,12,13].”
From Virtual Reality for Addressing Depression and Anxiety: A Bibliometric Analysis (2023) · cites this paper as [8]
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- Authors
- Baghaei, N., Stemmet, L., Hlasnik, A., Emanov, K., Hach, S., Naslund, J. A., Billinghurst, M., Khaliq, I., & Liang, H.-N.
- Affiliations
- Otago Polytechnic (NZ)
- Otago Polytechnic Auckland Campus (OPAIC), Auckland, New Zealand
- Unitec Institute of Technology (NZ)
- Harvard University (US)
- University of Auckland (NZ)
- Media Design School (NZ)
- Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (CN)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-04-25
- Pages
- 1-9
- OpenAlex
- W3029943186
- Cited by
- 34
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 4
- FWCI
- 3.10
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Education and Learning Interventions
- Keywords
- virtual reality, mental health, depression, self-compassion, IVR, early intervention, youth, mental health prevention
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