PATRONUS - Personalized anxiety therapy through longitudinal & user-aware services

imec ICON
VR technology
Usability & user experience testing
Personalized health

How can we use VR in an anxiety treatment context? 

Mental health is critical to overall health. Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and disabling conditions. Exposure therapy (ET) is an effective treatment for anxiety patients, but it is also time-consuming, expensive and difficult to control. PATRONUS seeks to develop a portfolio of IT tools that provides personalized, blended, emotion-aware support to therapists and patients throughout the entire anxiety treatment process. The therapist will have: an accurate view on the patient anxiety level throughout the complete treatment, VRET solutions that can easily be controlled and personalized, follow-up in-between sessions using a home-therapy VR set and a motivational coaching app.

We at imec-mict-UGent are doing usability & user experience testing, organisation of focus groups and expert interviews to determine user requirements and optimize the system, experiments on effectiveness of VR anxiety therapy (both cross-sectional and longitudinal).

Partners: Van Roey Automation, PreviewLabs, The Human Link, Bazookas, IBCN, imec-IDLab-UGent, imec-BAN

Project Duration: 01/10/2017 - 30/09/2019

Contact: Lieven De Marez