The Therapeutic Lamp; Treating Small Animal Phobias

By Maja Wrzesien, Mariano Alcañiz, Cristina Botella, Jean-Marie Burkhardt, Juana Bretón-López, Mario Ortega and Daniel Beneito Brotons

NOTE: This is an overview of the entire article, which appeared in the January/February 2013 issue of the IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine.
Click here to read the entire article.

Approximately five percent of people suffer from animal phobias such as arachnophobia, or fear of spiders. Although such phobias can be managed and cured, between 60 and 80 percent of phobia sufferers don’t seek treatment, and the treatment itself has low acceptance and high dropout rates. This article introduces the Therapeutic Lamp (TL), an innovative technology that enables therapists to effectively treat small animal phobias in a virtual environment. TL allows for face-to-face therapy involving direct confrontation with a virtual animal in a real environment. Researchers aimed to provide phobia sufferers a tool to deal with their feared animals at the lowest anxiety level in a highly interactive and engaging environment. TL is a tabletop system that integrates the user’s hands, a coffee mug, a cardboard box, a flyswatter, and finger and object detection and tracking over a flat surface (See figure). The research team incorporated augmented reality options using a commercial development system for interactive 2D and 3D applications for Windows PCs.

Some exposure session exercises. The participant (a) observes cockroaches walking on his or her hands, (b) looks for cockroaches hidden under a cardboard box, (c) kills spiders with a flyswatter, and (d) plays a therapeutic game in which he or she catches as many cockroaches as possible in a limited amount of time in a virtual kitchen.

Some exposure session exercises. The participant (a) observes cockroaches walking on his or her hands, (b) looks for cockroaches hidden under a cardboard box, (c) kills spiders with a flyswatter, and (d) plays a therapeutic game in which he or she catches as many cockroaches as possible in a limited amount of time in a virtual kitchen.

The therapist is able to change the animals’ number and size, control their movement, make them dead or paralyzed, make a cockroach move its wings, or a spider build a web. The therapist can also input the patient’s clinical data during therapy, and write comments and observations about the patient during therapy.

The article details the 12 exercises performed in one of the clinical protocols, considered an intensive exposure session. The exercises progressed from those that potentially created less anxiety to those that created the greatest anxiety. Other protocols included the use of games such as catching the animal with a coffee mug, looking for an animal hidden under a box, or killing the animal with a fly swatter.

See the article for the authors’ evaluation of, and future plans for, the project.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Maja Wrzesien (mwrzesien@labhuman.i3bh.es) is a PhD student and researcher at Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación en Bioingeniería y Tecnología Orientada al Ser Humano, Universitat Politècnica de València, I3BH/LabHuman.

Mariano Alcañiz (malcaniz@labhuman.i3bh.es) is a full professor at Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación en Bioingeniería y Tecnología Orientada al Ser Humano, Universitat Politècnica de València, I3BH/LabHuman. He also participates in the Ciber project, Fisiopatología de Obesidad y Nutrición, Instituto de Salud Carlos III.

Cristina Botella (botella@uji.es) is a full professor in Departamento de Psicologia Basica y Psicobiologia, Universidad Jaume I. She also participates in the Ciber project, Fisiopatología de Obesidad y Nutrición, Instituto de Salud Carlos III.

Jean-Marie Burkhardt (jean-marie.burkhardt@ifsttar.fr) is a senior researcher in psychology ergonomics at Institut Français des Sciences et Technologies des Transports, de l’Aménagement et des Réseaux.

Juana Bretón-López (breton@psb.uji.es) is a lecturer in Departamento de Psicologia Basica y Psicobiologia, Universidad Jaume I.

Mario Ortega (mortega@labhuman.i3bh.es) is is a researcher at Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación en Bioingeniería y Tecnología Orientada al Ser Humano, Universitat Politècnica de València, I3BH/ LabHuman.

Daniel Beneito Brotons (dbeneito@labhuman.i3bh.es) is a developer at Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación en Bioingeniería y Tecnología Orientada al Ser Humano, Universitat Politècnica de València, I3BH/ LabHuman.