VR BOT Dialog

A therapeutic VoiceBot for the exposure therapy of a mental disorder - agoraphobia is one of the most modern therpautic tools for the treatment of agoraphobia in Poland and in the world.
The application takes the patient to virtual reality.
The number of details and the quality of execution of virtual reality guarantee a complete disturbance in this environment and a sense of the reality of experiences.
A protocol for treating agoraphobia in VR exposure is embedded in VoiceBot.
VoiceBot recognizes the voice of the person undergoing therapy and guides the patient through the entire treatment process.
The application initially determines the severity of the anxiety problem by sampling the severity of distress at different levels of agoraphobic stimuli severity.
Then the proper therapy begins, consisting of 40-minute sessions.
No additional and expensive equipment is needed to conduct therapy - 3D frames with a joystick are enough, into which we put our own phone with a headset connected to it and launch the application on the smartphone.
Various environments have been created for this therapy.
It is a city with a multitude of streets, a market, a church and a shop, it is inside a shop and inside a church, it is a forest, an open space in the form of a desert and a landscape in the mountains.
Each of these spaces can be used in daylight as well as at night.
We can choose the environment in which we feel the strongest anxiety stimuli and slowly adapt to it during the VR exposure.
This slow accustoming to anxiety-generating stimuli, i.e.
habituation, usually takes place after several or a dozen or so sessions.
If the level of distress decreases as a result of effective exposure, VoiceBot itself increases the intensity of agoraphobic stimuli, getting closer and closer to the point when adaptation to fear allows us to move freely in reality without symptoms of agoraphobia.
VoiceBot was developed by the Think and Feel foundation in cooperation with the Clinic of Psychiatric Rehabilitation of the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice, headed by prof.
Brand Krzystanka.
Prof.
Marek Krzystanek as a psychiatrist and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist is the author of the concept and architecture of the application.
Doctors and psychotherapists also took part in its creation, taking care of its functionality and user-friendliness.