Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for Driving Phobia Disorder (2): System Refinement and Verification

Abstract

Driving phobia is a widespread anxiety disorder in modern society. Driving phobia disorders often cause difficulties in people’s professional and social activities. A growing trend for treating driving phobia is to apply virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET). We refined the system’s performance based on the previous research publication and have conducted a VRET pre-test research study with treatment and control group subjects to demonstrate the effectiveness of VRET. Some systemic problems were discovered in the first published experiment. For example, the experimental process and the virtual reality (VR) driving scenarios had to be modified to reflect realistic scenarios causing the fear of driving. These issues were identified and improvements made and verified in this research. A total of 130 subjects completed the driving behavior survey. Thirty subjects were randomly drawn from the subjects with high driving fear questionnaire scores and were invited to participate in the treatment experiments. The latest research presents the refined VRET for driving phobia disorders, including the revised system framework, the main modules and integration, and the subjects’ biodata collection, management, and analysis. The experiment results provide strong evidence that the refined VRET design helps subjects overcome driving phobias. The subjects’ subjective distress and fear of driving are reduced significantly through the implementation of VRET.

Keywords

• driving phobia
• post-traumatic stress disorder
• virtual reality exposure therapy
• physiological signals