An Interactive Application for Detection and Treatment of Phobias Using Virtual Reality and Machine Learning

Phobia is a fear that occurs in humans when subjected to certain objects, situations, etc in their daily routine. It causes anxiety and increases heart rate for a couple of minutes until the person confirms there is no danger. Phobias are very common among people, where some of them know their fears while others choose to refrain themselves from knowing their phobias. A phobia can become critical when a person continuously undergoes a particular situation which leads to anxiety and finally causes depression. To overcome one's fears, we intent to propose a solution that could help people to diagnose their specific phobias and treat them accordingly. Our novelty for this solution lies in proposing a PhobiCure mobile application which can accurately detect specific phobias of a particular person while we intend to use VR system having inbuilt eye tracking cameras to detect eye movements of a person encountering fear. Simultaneously, the mouth expressions are captured through front camera of mobile where both eye movements and mouth expressions are fed as input to the CNN model which obtained an accuracy of 76.2%. The increase in heart rate is also monitored which can help to determine the level of fear while images are displayed in the VR headset. After a phobia is confirmed by determining fear level using the 4-choice scale, treatment for the same is suggested to the user using the Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET).