AR-Therapist: Design and Simulation of an AR-Game Environment as a CBT for Patients with ADHD
This work addresses the need for more accessible and optimized therapy for patients with ADHD, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing AR technology to a known therapeutic approach.
The paper tackled the limitations of traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for patients with ADHD by designing and simulating an AR-based game environment called AR-Therapist, which aims to provide an alternative treatment to enhance patient engagement in real and virtual settings.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in which patients have difficulties related to inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Those patients are in need of a psychological therapy use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to enhance the way they think and behave. This type of therapy is mostly common in treating patients with anxiety and depression but also is useful in treating autism, obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. A major limitation of traditional CBT is that therapists may face difficulty in optimizing patients' neuropsychological stimulus following a specified treatment plan. Other limitations include availability, accessibility and level-of-experience of the therapists. Hence, this paper aims to design and simulate a generic cognitive model that can be used as an appropriate alternative treatment to traditional CBT, we term as "AR-Therapist." This model takes advantage of the current developments of augmented reality to engage patients in both real and virtual game-based environments.