Virtual Reality-Based Mobile App can Treat Fear of Heights

Repeated use of a smartphone-based virtual reality exposure therapy can greatly improve the behaviour and subjective state of well-being of individuals in height situations. About 5% of the general population experiences fear of heights.

Virtual reality (VR)-based app for smartphones has been developed to reduce fear of heights, reveals a new study.

The findings indicated that trial participants who spent a total of four hours training with the app at home had an improvement in their ability to handle real height situations.

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‘Repeated use of a smartphone-based virtual reality exposure therapy can greatly improve the behaviour and subjective state of well-being of individuals in height situations.’

"What is new, however, is that smartphones can be used to produce the virtual scenarios that previously required a technically complicated type of treatment, and this makes it much more accessible," said lead author Dorothee Bentz, from the University of Basel in Switzerland.

Fear of heights is a widespread phenomenon. Approximately 5 percent of the general population experiences a debilitating level of discomfort in height situations.

For the study, published in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine, the team developed a smartphone-based virtual reality exposure therapy app called Easyheights.

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The app uses 360-degree images of real locations, which the researchers captured using a drone. People can use the app on their own smartphones together with a special virtual reality headset.

During the virtual experience, the user stands on a platform that is initially one meter above the ground. After allowing acclimatization to the situation for a certain interval, the platform automatically rises. In this way, the perceived distance above the ground increases slowly but steadily without an increase in the person's level of fear.

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The research team studied the efficacy of this approach in a randomized, controlled trial. Fifty trial participants with a fear of heights either completed a four-hour height training program.

The efficacy of the Easyheights training proved comparable to that of conventional exposure therapy, the team said.

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The results from the study suggest that the repeated use of a smartphone-based virtual reality exposure therapy can greatly improve the behaviour and subjective state of well-being in height situations, they added.

Source-IANS