Mental health and substance abuse patients face many challenges in receiving effective long-term outpatient behavioral therapies, including issues related to accessibility and personalized care. Mobile health technologies, particularly those integrating virtual reality (VR), are increasingly becoming more accessible and affordable, thus providing a potential avenue to deploy outpatient behavioral therapy. This paper proposes a method to address the aforementioned challenges by personalizing and validating VR simulation content for behavioral therapy. An initial demonstration will be performed for tobacco cessation, which is a critical public health treatment area for mental illness and substance abuse. The method empirically builds smoker personas from theoretically grounded survey content. The personas are then used to design and pilot VR simulation modules tailored to behavioral interventions, which will be tested in the patient population. The VR simulation will record a subject’s emotions and brain activities in real-time through subjective (surveys) and objective (neurophysiology) measures of emotional response. The overall goal of the study is to validate the VR content by demonstrating that significant differences are seen in emotional response when presenting content personalized for the patient.

Patient telemetry monitoring stations in hospitals have received considerable attention due to the widely reported incidents of patient deaths linked to operator error. Monitoring stations are one of the most critical environments in a healthcare setting, where telemetry technician delayed response or failure to respond may contribute to adverse patient events. The technician's task is to monitor patient vital signs and respond to irregular patient vitals by communicating this event to the patient care team. Poorly designed monitoring stations can potentially increase technician cognitive workload and stress, and decrease performance (time to respond, accuracy of response). This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluate the impact of monitoring station design on telemetry technician performance through the use of neurophysiological measurement (heart rate, heart rate variability, blood pressure, electroencephalography, core temperature, eye tracking) in a virtual reality (VR) environment. VR provides several benefits over conventional 2D simulations and physical mock-ups by providing an immersive environment where design alternatives can be generated with greater flexibility and speed and also without interfering with daily operations in a safety-critical environment. A replicate model of a telemetry monitoring station at MedStar Washington Hospital Center was simulated in VR. Features such as monitor layout, the number of patients simultaneously monitored, and the graphical user interface design, will be modified to evaluate technician performance for each design alternative. The outcomes of this research can be used to inform telemetry room design across several hospital settings and ultimately reduce adverse patient events due to poor telemetry technician performance.

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