Creating a New Reality for Teen Mental Healthcare

While some may think augmented reality is no more useful for anything other than video games or a passing fad, researchers are intrigued by its appeal to children and young adults, as well as the psychological issues affecting them.

With rates of teen anxiety and depression on the rise, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering and School of Medicine are investigating a new form of “exposure therapy” to help patients and clinicians alike treat these mental health concerns. 

Murat Akcakaya, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering with a secondary appointment in Pitt’s Department of Bioengineering, and Mary Woody, assistant professor of psychiatry, received a three-year, $350,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their collaborative project “Development of a precision closed loop BCI for socially fearful teens with depression and anxiety.” 

Along with Northeastern University’s Sarah Ostadabbas, the team is developing technology that uses augmented reality (AR) to help treat teens with anxiety and depression. The proposed system, ExposureCARE, uses a combination of AR goggles and machine learning software to create an immersive 3D environment to help patients confront their fears, while an EEG cap that monitors patient brain activity allows therapists to track patients’ brain signals, responses to the fear stimuli, and their progress in real time. 

Through AR, patients will initially be prompted with images of common fearful scenarios like public speaking. Woody hopes that ExposureCARE will ease some barriers between clinicians and patients, specifically when it comes to self-reporting these fears. 

“Unlike traditional methods that rely solely on patient self-reports and have difficulty bringing the patients' real world social fears into the psychotherapy room, ExposureCARE integrates modern technology to provide real-time feedback about patient treatment response as they view digital simulations of their real-world fears in the clinic,” Woody said. 

A unique advantage of this project is the ability to understand patients' responses to their social fears in real time, which will help the team develop a fear index. Akcakaya’s expertise in this project is connecting augmented reality to EEG’s using signals and machine learning. 

“We’re going to process the data, and then try to understand certain perspectives or patterns in the brain signals that can be associated with social fear,” Akcakaya said. 

Once the patient's responses to the AR prompt are assessed, clinicians will conduct interviews to understand what they are actually most fearful about and what kind of scenarios they want to work on. Another benefit of ExposureCARE is teens are early adopters or augmented reality, which may make therapy more appealing and effective for teen patients who are often hesitant to counseling, according to Woody. 

“I am trained as both a clinician and a researcher, and I see tremendous value in the development of bioengineering-informed models of care that can dynamically respond to patients' real-time treatment needs and deliver highly personalized psychotherapy,” Woody said. “The opportunity to combine cutting-edge technology with existing evidence-based therapies offers the promise of improving the well-being of teens suffering from anxiety and depression.