Psychiatrists have found that one of the most effective ways of treating patients with phobias is to expose them to the very thing they are afraid of. Exposure therapy, as it鈥檚 called, is unique in that in order to help someone who is afraid of snakes, for example, you鈥檇 have to bring a live snake into the office.
Dr. Arash Javanbakht, director of the (or STARC) at , started a project about seven years ago to work around bringing reptiles into the office. The project sought to help people confront their fears through a new type of exposure therapy, conducted solely through augmented reality, or AR.
This study aimed to help patients with phobias confront their instinctual fears by creating technology that could insert lifelike visuals of what they feared into their environment. Patients can put on a headset and see the same room they saw before, just with the addition of their fears 鈥 in the case of this study, spiders.
To accurately measure patients鈥 progress, STARC brought in a live tarantula, aptly named Tony STARC. Before beginning the AR exposure therapy, Javanbakht鈥檚 team would note how close the patient could get to Tony STARC鈥檚 tank. After an exposure therapy session of only an hour or less, they found that all patients were able to touch either the tarantula or the tank containing it. This change occurred because as patients see what they fear while not being harmed, they can train their bodies to realize that their fears are only, well, fears.
Past experiments have tested exposure therapy using virtual reality, but Javanbakht says augmented reality creates significantly better results. With virtual reality, a person is inserted into a digital environment, whereas augmented reality inserts something digital into the observer鈥檚 real surroundings, making the therapy feel more real. So even though the experience isn鈥檛 real 鈥 and patients know it 鈥 their body鈥檚 instinctual fear response is.
Preliminary studies like this show how augmented reality is revolutionizing the way exposure therapy is conducted, and not just for spiders. New, similar projects are in the works to help people with obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. The goal is to one day implement this type of AR technology in a clinical setting.
As Javanbakht says, 鈥淭his could definitely be a big part of the future of the psychiatric field.鈥
This story is from the feature in the October听2022 issue of 糖心vlog安卓版. Read more in听our digital edition.
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