Bringing Exposure Therapy for Animal Phobias to Real-Life Context With Augmented Reality

Anxiety and stress-related disorders are very common. One in three people experience some form of anxiety disorder including phobias, PTSD, and OCD. These disorders chronically limit one's ability to function and enjoy life. In addition to the common prevalence, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left about 13% of the returning veterans with combat PTSD, and even more with partial symptoms. Lifetime prevalence of PTSD is as high as 10% in women. Economic burden of anxiety disorders is between 42 to 52 billion dollars, one third of the country's total mental health bill. Near 30% of this money is spent in treatment costs. Burden of lost workdays only for PTSD is $3 billion. OCD affects 2.3% of the U.S. adults, half have serious impairment. Social phobia is one of the most common anxiety disorders with a 12 months prevalence of 6.8% and lifetime prevalence of 12.1%

Exposure therapy is the most effective treatment for cue-related anxiety disorders such as specific phobias, social phobia, OCD, and PTSD. The core principle is exposure to the feared objects/situations guided by a clinician. For example, in arachnophobia (fear of spiders) patient is exposed to picture of a spider on a computer, or from distance in the office, and gradually, with help of the clinician, they tolerate view of the spider from a closer distance. Clinician has a crucial role as the social safety cue in this process.

Although exposure therapy is very effective in treatment of phobias, OCD, and PTSD, there are limitations. Access and adherence to, and efficacy of exposure therapy are limited to 50% by multiple factors: First, there is a national shortage of psychiatrists and psychotherapists; patients often have to be on waiting list for weeks to months, and in many geographical locations such services are extremely scarce or do not exist. More than 50% of clinicians are not trained in exposure therapy, and there is usually geographical barriers for access to skilled therapists. In general, more than half of the US counties are unable to recruit mental health providers. Very frequently patients only receive medication or supportive therapy for several years before they can see a specialist trained in exposure therapy. Certain conditions like social phobia or PTSD make it increasingly difficult to leave the house and go to the clinic. Second, the feared objects are not always available in office for exposure and exposure most of the times is limited to pictures, movie clips, imagination, narrative, or memories. Imaginary exposure commonly lacks the level of arousal that is required for development of new safety learning. Third, patients have to practice real-life exposure on their own. In vivo treatment is commonly limited: often patients do not create situations that elicit the optimal safety learning, do not know how to create exposure situations, or simply do not follow through because of high anxiety in the absence of someone to coach them. This gap between exposure in the office, and real-life exposure remains a significant roadblock in successful exposure therapy. Fourth, clinicians are usually unable to provide treatment across multiple physical, temporal and social contexts that can promote contextualization of safety learning. Exposure mostly happens in the physical, emotional, social, and temporal context of the office visits. A fifth limitation is that current exposure therapy methods, do not address overgeneralization of the fear response.

Augmented Reality Augmented reality (AR) is the next wave of interactive human-computer technology that provides an opportunity of mixing virtually created objects with reality. Instead of creating a completely synthetic environment, AR adds virtually created objects to the real non-synthetic context. These elements become part of the real context, or cover some of its components. AR technology ultimately becomes less expensive than virtual reality (VR) technology because it does not require modeling the whole environment.

The investigators have developed a proof of concept prototype. The prototype that includes a scenario for treatment of fear of spiders (arachnophobia) and fear of snakes. Software platform connects the patient to a clinician who is located in the same or a different physical space, the patient wears the AR device, the clinician is able to see the patient's field of view, and positions a virtual spider/snake in the patient's environment, clinician determines direction/velocity of motions of the virtual spider/snake, clinician leads patient through the process of exposure therapy process until patient is desensitized to the view of the spider/snake. Exposure can then advance to higher number of spiders/snakes, or larger ones.