The broader impacts and commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the progress toward developing a treatment delivery system for individuals with debilitating fears. The system, based on augmented reality and virtual reality, addresses significant limitations of other treatment modalities. Approximately 9% of adults in the United States experience a clinically significant phobia that causes impairments in functioning at high cost to the individual and society. Despite the functional impairment caused by the debilitating fears characteristic of Specific Phobia, nearly 2/3rds of individuals do not seek treatment likely due to the aversive qualities of the most effective treatment, exposure therapy. Untreated, phobias can have significant economic impact on society. Therefore, the technology in this project has broader impacts to society by improving access to treatment through delivery through a more acceptable modality. Customers are expected to be licensed mental health practitioners and the product will allow them to expose their patients to computer generated phobic stimuli via an augmented reality (AR) headset. The technology will allow clinicians to adopt a therapy delivery system that is more acceptable to clients, while reducing clinician time and overall treatment costs.
This I-Corps project will involve conducting customer discovery interviews to test product-market fit for the development of an augmented reality (AR) platform that allows people to overcome debilitating fears characteristic of Specific Phobia. The project is based on research indicating that only a minority of individuals with this highly treatable disorder obtain intervention services because typically-delivered exposure therapy has highly aversive qualities. Approximately 1 in 4 patients reject the treatment when it is introduced. However, research also indicates that the same treatment delivered in virtual reality (VR) environments is a highly preferred therapy modality with a low rejection rate (3%). Unfortunately, this approach is not widely adopted by therapists because the time to create a complete VR environment with the fear stimulus is costly, resulting in poor product-market fit. With the rapid development of AR-based technology and the low-cost of rendering AR environments relative to VR environments, this I-Corps project offers the benefits of VR-assisted therapy (lower patient rejection rates/higher patient preference) while avoiding the barriers to clinician adoption. This technology is expected to increase patient access to and engagement in treatment, while simultaneously reducing clinician time and costs spent preparing for individual exposure tasks.
