Deep

Abstract

Anxiety disorders are among the most frequently diagnosed mental health problems in children, leading to potentially devastating outcomes on a personal level and high costs for society. Although evidence-based interventions are readily available, their outcomes are often disappointing and variable. In particular, existing interventions are not effective long-term nor tailored to differences in individual responsiveness. We therefore need a new approach to the prevention and treatment of anxiety in children and a commensurate scientific methodology to uncover individual profiles of change. We argue that applied games have a great deal of potential for both. The current paper presents results from a recent pilot study using a biofeedback virtual reality game (DEEP). DEEP integrates established therapeutic principles with an embodied and intuitive learning process towards improved anxiety regulation skills.

HCI and Affective Health

“…All 12 of the articles presented systems that engaged endusers in biofeedback loops. Input included: breathing [63,166,169]; heart rate [91,103,153]; electroencephalography (EEG) [72]; bodily movements [119]; indoor-positioning [88]; electro-dermal activity (EDA) [110]; one of the biofeedback systems was more of a toolkit, allowing many different biosignals as input [113]. Apart from the diversity in biosignal input, there was also a richness in outputs that these biofeedback systems produced.…”

“…Apart from the diversity in biosignal input, there was also a richness in outputs that these biofeedback systems produced. Most common were forms of visual and/or auditory feedback [63,72,91,110,119,169] and haptics [113,147], but there was also a touchable animated crystal ball [153], underwater swimming in a VR-environment [166], a game changing its difficulty level [103], and an alarm preventing the sleepwalkers from entering dangerous areas [88].…”

Towards Affective Chronometry

“…Despite the adaptive value of emotions for signaling events of significance, emotional awareness and regulation, i.e., knowing our emotions, and how we can control them, are complex skills that many people find difficult to acquire. HCI work has focused on technologies for affective feedback in both clinical [46,62,74,85] and non-clinical settings [26,30,41,48,92]. Such work aims to support increased self-awareness by providing interactive feedback mirroring physiological signals.…”

Development and Pilot Test of a Virtual Reality Respiratory Biofeedback Approach

“…With diaphragmatic breathing, sensors located on the abdomen (e.g., strain gauges, accelerometers, linear potentiometers) pick up respiration-induced abdominal movements, which are then used to infer respiration. The detected signals (inhalation, exhalation) can be fed back to the user directly (e.g., Tinga et al 2019;van Rooij et al 2016;Vidyarthi and Riecke 2013) or in the form of pre-processed, aggregated parameters such as respiratory frequency or depth (e.g., Bhandari et al 2015;Harris et al 2014;Morarend et al 2011;Parnandi et al 2013). The feedback can serve several goals.…”

“…The success of a biofeedback exercise to raise awareness partly depends on the visual appeal and rewarding characteristic of the biofeedback system and stimuli. To optimize the engagement with and the level of control over biofeedback exercises, a growing number of studies have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of using head-mounted virtual reality (VR) to deliver biofeedback (e.g., Blum et al 2019;Gromala et al 2015;Rockstroh et al 2020;Tinga et al 2019;van Rooij et al 2016;Weerdmeester et al 2017). Due to the recent technological advances in the field, VR has become an accessible and affordable technology.…”