Sistema para auxílio no tratamento de aracnofobia usando realidade aumentada

Abstract

This work is intended to use Augmented Reality techniques in the treatment of patients with phobia that are not capable of doing in vivo exposition treatment to the object or situation causing the phobia, specially patients with arachnophobia. The state of art of treatment of psychological disorders using the exposition to the objects of phobia in order to make the treatment shows that there is a great necessity of innovation in the ways the treatment is applied to obtain success on the evaluated cases obeserved on the researches and works in the scientific field. Such a necessity is reflected in the treatment of psychological disorders that use exposition to objects, places or animals, as in the cases of phobia. Many researches point out that the use of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in the treatment of psychological disorders have obtained interesting results what stress the choice of those techniques in this present work. The system of AR developed along with therapists presents two types of AR visualization: one os vision based on a monitor screen and the other is direct vision by means of AR goggles and presents a increase of 3D level. The prototype was tested by the consulting therapists themselves and users of the system. They evaluated it and in a collaboration method they brought important contributions to the development of the system. When the analisys of the results was done, it was observed that the equipments used together with the prototype for the treatment such as webcams, AR goggles and monitor screen are essential for the success of the treatment, becoming primordial the attention given to such items. The results validate the feasibility of the use of AR techniques to treat Arachnophobia and the possibility of treating other psychological disorders of the same nature.