The idea for this project came from our personal lives. Every team member had an activity or situation that they feared about. Moreover, based on our research we found that anxiety & phobias are the most common mental disability in the US. There treatment usually involves exposure therapy, which involves making the patient physically face their fear to train themselves. This is often not feasible for people conditions like archnophobia (fear of spiders) or agoraphobia(fear of driving), because it involves an element of physical risk for the person. Hence, we came up with the idea of embedding the user in a virtual reality where he can face his fears to gain control over his reactions to similar real world interactions.
Our project embeds the user in a virtual reality environment and based on their fears or anxiety conditions, it generates a scenario for them to experience. The scenario gets increasingly more difficult as time passes. Alexa initiates a phobia skill to calm down the user during the interaction. A fit-bit is used to record his vitals and displayed on a dashboard for Doctor's to see in real-time.
We built the VR experience using the Occulus rift, React.js, Alexa Skill Kit & Fitbit Developer Kit.
We were working with VR for the very first time so it was quite challenging for us to build the interactions to make them realistic.
We are really proud of the fact that we were able to build 3 interactions and integrate them with FitBit & Alexa.
We learned about programming in Unity for building VR experiences.
We plan to have a more evolved experiences for different anxiety conditions.
Unity Project - https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12fKVDcIEpFPj8u5u8X3GinEm1IZgg119?usp=sharing