Exploring the Opportunities and Challenges of Enabling Clinical-friendly Drug Psychotherapy with Virtual Reality and Biofeedback Technologies

Drug addiction is a chronic disorder associated with many of the emotional or cognitive problems observed in addicted individuals. As a result, drug-addicted patients often display deficits in their mind-body awareness and easily ignore or fail to identify emotional or environmental cues. This study conducted a needs assessment study to gain guidelines for incorporating virtual reality and biofeedback technologies to assist psychotherapists in raising patients’ awareness and identifying their cues in psychotherapy. Our results identify current difficulties to reinforce mind-body awareness and correct attributions of craving stimuli. Also, we summarized concerns and the potential to promote the effectiveness of psychotherapy when applying virtual reality and biofeedback technologies to induce cravings. We also proposed a preliminary design of technology solutions to incorporate clinical-friendly VR-based craving inducing along with real-time biofeedback for enabling psychotherapists to jointly review the induced craving events based on the collected information.