Breathing Biofeedback for Police Officers in a Stressful Virtual Environment: Challenges and Opportunities
Open accessAbstract
As part of the Dutch national science program “Professional Games for Professional Skills” we developed a stress-exposure biofeedback training in virtual reality (VR) for the Dutch police. We aim to reduce the acute negative impact of stress on performance, as well as long-term consequences for mental health by facilitating physiological stress regulation during a demanding decision task. Conventional biofeedback applications mainly train physiological regulation at rest. This might limit the transfer of the regulation skills to stressful situations. In contrast, we provide the user with the opportunity to practice breathing regulation while they carry out a complex task in VR. This setting poses challenges from a technical – (real-time processing of noisy biosignals) as well as from a user-experience perspective (multi-tasking). We illustrate how we approach these challenges in our training and hope to contribute a useful reference for researchers and developers in academia or industry who are interested in using biosignals to control elements in a dynamic virtual environment.
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VR and BF successfully enhanced breathing training.
“Furthermore, VR and BF successfully enhanced breathing training (Brammer et al., 2021;Rockstroh et al., 2021).”
From Frontal Electroencephalography Asymmetry and Desynchronized Functional Connectivity Associated with Long-Term and Short-Term Breathing Training (2026) · cites this paper as Brammer et al., 2021
In ‘Challenge 1: Choice of the Biofeedback Parameter > Prioritizing Controllability’ (page unavailable), the pilot data show lower breathing rates and higher biofeedback scores in sessions with biofeedback, as well as improvement across sessions. This supports a benefit from biofeedback in the VR training, but the paper describes the findings as suggestive and does not isolate whether VR itself enhanced breathing training. (LLM, conf=0.87)
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- Authors
- Brammer, J. C., van Peer, J. M., Michela, A., van Rooij, M. M. J. W., Oostenveld, R., Klumpers, F., Dorrestijn, W., Granic, I., & Roelofs, K.
- Affiliations
- Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)
- Corresponding author
- Brammer, Jan C.
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2021-03-12
- Volume
- 12
- Pages
- 586553-586553
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7994769
- OpenAlex
- W3136023411
- Cited by
- 38
- References
- 38
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 6
- FWCI
- 4.60
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Radboud Repository (Radboud University) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Radboud Repository (Radboud University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine › Heart Rate Variability and Autonomic Control
- Keywords
- biofeedback, respiratory control, police officers, occupational stress, virtual reality training, biomedical signal processing, multitasking, mental health, decision-making under stress
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