The field of psychotherapy is seeing a new wave of more convenient and affordable AI-powered chatbots and VR systems that can help with mental health. Is this the new norm since the pandemic attributed to more mental health issues? Recently, VR has been passed around in many industries, including the healthcare niche. This technology shows opportunities to augment a person’s mental well-being by offering accessibility. Some people would prefer VR mental health support instead of its face-to-face counterpart for some reasons.
People have always pictured therapy with a licensed therapist in the room, talking to them face-to-face and asking ‘How do you feel about it?” Now with the new experiments in healthcare involving VR and AI-operated chatbots, is this industry shifting to digital means?
It’s hard to imagine someone struggling with mental health issues talking to, for lack of a better word, robots. But what these new tech-powered psychotherapy systems lack in physical connection, they make up for in accessibility and affordability.
According to a Gallup study, Americans experienced record-high levels of worry, stress, anger, and sadness during the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was because people were bombarded with alarming deaths and diseases.
China, as we speak, is still trying to roll out lockdowns and strict restrictions to contain recent coronavirus outbreaks. In a nation where mental health issues are esoteric for many, the pandemic caused grave negative implications that augmented the country’s mental health crisis.
A Shanghai University survey found that 35 percent of respondents experienced mental health issues such as insomnia, anxiety, depression, or acute stress, especially during the peak of the pandemic.
An overpopulated country has had issues combatting mental health crises, with awareness being one of the major lacking aspects. And this is where VR and AI-powered chatbots will come into play.
Individualized VR mental health support for patient profiling
The VR tech, which will supposedly help in psychotherapy, will provide a more individualized therapy session. The patients get to choose an avatar in their preferred setting. And this will make therapists get to know their clients more in treatment.
Scientists have developed a novelty in healthcare called iVR, which will improve the participants’ mental health and boost self-compassion.
A Department of Computing at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Professor Hai-Ning Liang, said, “It allows participants to make choices that would be difficult for a mental health professional to replicate in real life. Those choices might enable the therapist to dig deeper into the psychological makeup of the patients and get information by observing their interaction that they would not be able to extract otherwise.”
Liang has created three prototypes over the last three years with a group of researchers from New Zealand, spearheaded by Dr. Nilufar Baghaei. The most recent iVR prototype was developed using the Unity software and Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 headsets.
Positive notes
Liang and the team report that the seven clinical psychologists’ preliminary interviews showed positive notes.
Some psychologists said the individualized system would enable them to better understand the clients. However, some said they would have to customize more controls for either decreasing or increasing individualization for each client, depending on their situation.
Chatbot therapy
Another groundbreaking system in tech was the development of the AI-powered chatbot Woebot in 2017. A team of AI experts and Stanford psychologists founded this project.
The app offers an automated agent that can communicate with people about their mental health and helpful options depending on their needs.
With the rise of more tech advantages in healthcare, experts suggest that people accept this reality. Instead of opposing it, people can help shape it through continued experiments and research-backed advancements.
