improving Service Access using Virtual Exposure (iSAVE)

Anxiety about receiving medical treatments can range from momentary worry and negative feelings, to longer term specified phobias and is a debilitating experience for a patient. Avoiding treatments or diagnostic procedures such as scans can negatively impact the care pathway and clinical outcomes for the patient, and avoidance of anxiety inducing experiences is known to exacerbate the problem in a vicious cycle. Current solutions to this problem for patients (e.g. therapy and sedation) are often expensive, time consuming and hard to access.

iSAVE is a project which will improve Service Access using Virtual Exposure. It will deliver Virtual Reality exposure therapy tools to help patients who are anxious about receiving health care treatments. The VR tool uses innovative eye tracking hardware and software, embedded into the VR headset, which monitors the anxiety levels of the patients while they are in VR; something which has not been a feature of existing exposure tools. Machine Learning is used to index the patient's anxiety levels from their eye movements, Artificial Intelligence enables the virtual tool to intelligently adapt the level of exposure the patient receives. This makes the exposure experience personalised to the individual, and therefore highly effective.

iSAVE will undertake additional industrial research that will make this tool ready for market, and accessible by the patients that need it. The project will; (1) improve and implement the machine learning approaches that are a novel feature of the tool, and test these with anxious patients; (2) further develop the user interface and experience to make the tool accessible to patients and end-users (practitioners and care providers); (3) establish what future clinical trials would be needed to reduce the uncertainty of implementation into the patient care pathway, including an analysis of delivery components into the NHS, and the requirements for regulatory approval.

Our objective is to get iSAVE ready for the mental health ecosystem. Into the hands of care providers to reduce costs and save time, and into the hands of patients, to reduce their anxiety and improve the care they recieve.