Innovative research allows people with altitude sickness to perform all kinds of daily activities.
Virtual reality cures altitude sickness. A team of researchers at the University of Oxford has successfully demonstrated this and has been the first to develop a programme based on this technology to treat a problem that is experienced by one in five people at some point in their lives and for which treatment is rarely offered.
The team led by Professor Daniel Freeman, from the Psychiatry Department of the university, has developed a virtual reality program in which a computer-generated virtual trainer designs a personalized psychological therapy for each patient, which includes users capable of interacting with the virtual coach using voice recognition technology.
As the University of Oxford details in a statement, a hundred people were chosen at random with fear of heights, all of them with the common element of having feared heights for 30 years. Those who received the therapy spent an average of two hours in virtual reality during five treatment sessions.
All participants in the VR group showed a reduction in fear of heights, with an average reduction of 68.0%. Half of the participants experienced a decline of more than three quarters. These results are better than expected with the best psychological intervention delivered face-to-face with a therapist, according to the university. The findings have been published in The Lancet Psychiatry.
Professor Freeman’s VR therapy, produced by the University of Oxford spin-out Oxford VR and tested in association with the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Center, led users using an HTC Vive handset to a computer-generated ten-story office building. Guided by Nic, the virtual trainer, the users carried out a series of activities, which increased in difficulty as they progressed.
“We designed the treatment to be as imaginative, entertaining and easy to navigate as possible. So the tasks that the participants were asked to do included crossing a rickety corridor, rescuing a cat from a tree in the atrium of the building, painting an image and playing the xylophone on the edge of a balcony, and finally mounting a virtual whale around the atrium space,” Freeman explains.
“The results are extraordinarily good. We were confident that the treatment would be effective, but the results exceeded our expectations. More than three-quarters of the participants who received VR treatments showed at least a halving of their fear of heights. Our study shows that virtual reality can be an extremely powerful means of delivering psychological therapy. We know that the most effective treatments are active: patients enter difficult situations and practice more useful ways of thinking and behaving. This is often impractical in face-to-face therapy, but is easily done in virtual reality,” the researcher adds.
Users were enthusiastic about the treatment. “What I notice is that in everyday life I am less reluctant to the edges, and the steps, and the heights, and I realize that when I’m doing RL and I’m out in the real world, I can say hello to the edge instead of leaning on it and going back. I feel like I’m making great progress,” explains Sarah, one of the participants in the study.