Personalizing Exposure Therapy via Reinforcement Learning
This work addresses the challenge of personalizing virtual reality exposure therapy for arachnophobia patients, offering an incremental improvement over existing rule-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically adapting therapeutic content for personalized exposure therapy by using reinforcement learning to generate virtual spiders based on physiological measures, and it demonstrated that this system significantly outperformed a rules-based method in a human subject study.
Personalized therapy, in which a therapeutic practice is adapted to an individual patient, can lead to improved health outcomes. Typically, this is accomplished by relying on a therapist's training and intuition along with feedback from a patient. However, this requires the therapist to become an expert on any technological components, such as in the case of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET). While there exist approaches to automatically adapt therapeutic content to a patient, they generally rely on hand-authored, pre-defined rules, which may not generalize to all individuals. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically adapt therapeutic content to patients based on physiological measures. We implement our approach in the context of virtual reality arachnophobia exposure therapy, and rely on experience-driven procedural content generation via reinforcement learning (EDPCGRL) to generate virtual spiders to match an individual patient. Through a human subject study, we demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms a more common rules-based method, highlighting its potential for enhancing personalized therapeutic interventions.