Research Article

Designing and Developing a Compacted Immersive Virtual Therapy Environment: RelaXRoom

Volume: 14 Number: 3 July 10, 2023
EN

Designing and Developing a Compacted Immersive Virtual Therapy Environment: RelaXRoom

Abstract

This study represents RelaXRoom as an immersive virtual reality experience to offer the psychological and social support during and after the pandemic. RelaXRoom includes three main modules for self-meditation, a therapy session with a therapist and a group therapy opportunity with other people who have similar problems with the user. The users of RelaXRoom can jump to the meditation scene and select their meditation music to meditate on the moon or the Himalayas via controllers or hand tracking. RelaXRoom uses Wit.ai for speech recognition and analysing the mood of users using the data table. If the user wants to participate in either group or peer-to-peer therapy, RelaXRoom will assign them to a virtual room depending on their moods or considering their particular needs. For the future of RelaXRoom, integrating a therapist pool to pick one considering their rate and professionality, anonymity, payment system, virtual buddies for every online user may enhance quality, privacy, feeling of presence and embodiment during the therapy sessions. RelaXRoom has the potential to be a facilitator for diagnosing people’s problems and supporting them.

Keywords

Supporting Institution

This project has no funder.

Thanks

Zeynep Tacgin has received a theoretical consultancy regarding therapy and psychotherapy from Melike Arpınar, Şeymanur Kalafat, Emin Bayraktar. The final version of RelaXRoom was evaluated by Nazenin Gure and Muntasar.

References

  1. Dozois DJ. Anxiety and depression in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic: A national survey. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne. 2020.
  2. Debowska A, Horeczy B, Boduszek D, Dolinski D. A repeated cross-sectional survey assessing university students' stress, depression, anxiety, and suicidality in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland. Psychological Medicine. 2020:1-4.
  3. Özdin S, Bayrak Özdin Ş. Levels and predictors of anxiety, depression and health anxiety during COVID-19 pandemic in Turkish society: The importance of gender. International Journal of Social Psychiatry. 2020;66(5):504-11.
  4. Pandey D, Bansal S, Goyal S, Garg A, Sethi N, Pothiyill DI, et al. Psychological impact of mass quarantine on population during pandemics—The COVID-19 Lock-Down (COLD) study. PLoS One. 2020;15(10):e0240501.
  5. Robb CE, de Jager CA, Ahmadi-Abhari S, Giannakopoulou P, Udeh-Momoh C, McKeand J, et al. Associations of social isolation with anxiety and depression during the early COVID-19 pandemic: a survey of older adults in London, UK. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 2020;11.
  6. Zhou J, Zogan H, Yang S, Jameel S, Xu G, Chen F. Detecting community depression dynamics due to covid-19 pandemic in australia. IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. 2021.
  7. Kim U, Bhullar N. Life in the pandemic: Social isolation and mental health. https://onlinelibrary wiley com/doi/pdfdirect/101111/jocn 15290. 2020.
  8. McBride HL, Joseph AJ, Schmitt PG, Holtz BM. Clinical recommendations for psychotherapists working during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic through the lens of AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy). Counselling Psychology Quarterly. 2020:1-21.

Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Health Policy

Journal Section

Research Article

Early Pub Date

June 19, 2023

Publication Date

July 10, 2023

Submission Date

March 8, 2022

Acceptance Date

June 8, 2023

Published in Issue

Year 2023 Volume: 14 Number: 3

EndNote
Taçgın Z (July 1, 2023) Designing and Developing a Compacted Immersive Virtual Therapy Environment: RelaXRoom. Acıbadem Üniversitesi Sağlık Bilimleri Dergisi 14 3 462–469.

Cited By