A Controlled Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy Application for Smartphones

“Every year, anxiety disorders affect nearly 18.1% of adults and are still registered as one of the most commons mental disorders (Saloni Dattani and Roser, 2021).”

“On the other side, intrinsic motivation is based on personal interest, the final reward is related to each individual (Fischer et al., 2019).”

“, 2011) and reduce disorderrelated symptoms (Lau et al., 2017).”

“The current problem is no longer the effectiveness of VR and the application of exposure therapy, but the user experience itself that can lead to more positive or negative results (Tao et al., 2021).”

“…elements and some therapists also tend to believe that in real-life exposure can be unethical by provoking uncontrollable fear to their patients and, depending on the disorder, by not being able to maintain the sessions private and violating the patient-client boundaries (Miloff et al., 2019).”

“The different levels of the serious games are achieved with the acquisition of skills or therapeutic progress (Botella et al., 2011).”

“However, psychologists who are specialized in other disorders like eating disorders, ADHD and OCD also believe VRET can be an alternative treatment with success (Lindner et al., 2019).”

“The use of serious games and gamification principles to promote treatment for mental illness had high levels of feasibility and acceptability among both users and providers (Fitzgerald and Ratcliffe, 2020).”

“Long term studies show the effectiveness of VR to ET in the treatment of phobias (Krzystanek et al., 2021).”

“Exposure therapy has proved its efficacy in the last 20 years (Botella et al., 2011; Anderson and Molloy, 2020).”

“So, with the help of VR, therapists can recognize OCD symptoms and diagnose this disturb easier (Van Bennekom et al., 2021).”

“Therapists also avoid invivo exposure due to the time-consuming sessions and the work around it, for instance, catching and keeping a spider in the clinic for later reuse (Hinze et al., 2021).”

“Serious games, unlike traditional computer games, are alternative educational, training, or therapeutic tools that go beyond mere entertainment (Lievense et al., 2021) and are an effective medium for creating a non-threatening and engaging learning environment (Fitzgerald and Ratcliffe, 2020).”

“Numerous authors have shown that VR experiences can be compared to real ones as VR scenarios can induce some sensations similar to the ones felt in the physical world (Penn and Hout, 2018).”

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