AR Phobia Exposure Therapy

To help people overcome their fears, a common method is exposure therapy. As the name suggests, such a treatment exposes patients to whatever it is that they fear to slowly accustom them to it.

Augmented reality could be a way of providing such therapies by projecting, for example, 3D models of animals into the room. In order to slowly accustom the patient to the animal, they will first be shown as simplified representations of the animals, later as 3D scans or accurate 3D models.

By the way, AR Phobia sometimes also refers to the fear of Augmented reality being actually real. Source: Urban dictionary.

Benefits

Such an app or system not only allows for easy and safe exposure therapy for the therapists, it gives patients direct access to the treatment for themselves. Therefore, after an instructional session with the therapist, part of the treatment could be done by the patient at home. That could, of course, free up a lot of resources for the therapist and make the therapy more convenient for the patient.

Challenges

For most patients, the 3D rendering would probably have to be highly realistic to recreate the same effect as in real life.

Take away

Augmented reality could make this form of therapy a lot safer, since the session could be stopped at any moment. The benefits are huge.

Examples

Phobos AR

Phobos is an app, that displays 3D models of, for example, spiders in the real world through AR. It increases the realism of those 3D representations throughout the therapy.

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ARPHOBIA

With ARPHOBIA, psychologists can use a modern app to work with patients in a safe environment.