VR Neurofeedback: A New Drug-free Treatment for Mental Disorders
Let’s start off with a riddle: the number of diagnoses of this mental disorder has shot up 43 percent between 2003 and 2011 in the United States, reaching the total number of patients to almost 6 million, and this disorder is prevalent among children aged 4–17, especially boys.
Current treatment for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
The answer is ADHD. ADHD causes patients to have trouble controlling their impulses and staying attentive to a particular incidence for a long time. Since these behaviors significantly affect children’s social life and education as a whole, doctors, as well as parents, have called for effective and personalized treatment for ADHD.
In reflecting on the increased concerns about ADHD, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) conducted Multimodal Treatment for ADHD (MTA) study which involved a combination of psychoeducation, medication, behavioral interventions, parent training and school support. However, as suggested by Harvard Health Publishing, the outcomes of MTA have been found increasingly ineffective especially in a long-term; the positive effects of drugs began to fade after children had completed the intensive drug therapy session and were entirely disappeared by the 36-month mark. Besides, even though the multimodal treatment somewhat reduced ADHD symptoms, there was no significant improvement on some critical measures including academic performance, social functioning, and aggressive behavior. Indeed, the group of children who underwent MTA still lagged behind the healthy subjects on 91% of the evaluation variables.
Neurofeedback: a better alternative treatment?
Neurofeedback(NFB), also called EEG Biofeedback, is a way to train the brain to have more balanced and healthy mind and body. Mainly, NFB has been touted as a more reliable alternative for ADHD treatments for its non-invasive and drug-free therapy process. NFB for ADHD typically examines a low-frequency range (theta and alpha) and a high-frequency range (beta) in subjects’ recorded EEG since the literature suggests that ADHD subjects demonstrate an excessive theta and alpha waves but fewer beta waves.
In contrast to the literature, a research team in the Technical University of Denmark devised a new method to train ADHD subjects with NFB. This group of researchers decided to look into P300 potential―a large positive voltage in the recorded EEG that peaks 300 ms after relevant stimuli―instead of beta, theta, and alpha waves as P300 potential is widely regarded as an attention-related indicator. For the experiment, they implemented a brain-computer interface (BCI) inside a virtual Reality (VR) classroom for NFB attention training. (BCI inside a virtual reality classroom: a potential training tool for attention)
The experiment includes two attention training games in the virtual classroom. The first training game is called ANISPELL. The subject sees a 4 x 4 grid of animal images in gray-scale with a black background. Randomly, a row or a column lights up by displaying the original colors of the animal images with a white background. A row or column lights up for 100 ms and returns to gray-scale. Each trial has 15 light-up sessions. For the entire trial, the subjects are instructed to pay close attention to a specific animal. After the trial terminates, they have to recall the color of the animal and locate the most dominantly colored part of the animal. Lastly, the experimenters ask an additional question that is completely irrelevant to the designated animal so that the subjects stay attentive during the entire session.
The second game, called T-Search, is little more challenging than the first. The subjects go through twelve different images one at a time for five trials. Eight of the twelve images have several red ‘X’s and ‘T’s (Fig. 2a) while four of them contain a blue ‘T’ with the reds (Fig. 2b-c). At the end of each trial, the subjects are asked to locate the location of the blue “T” in a compartmentalized square (Fig. 2d) and count the number of red T’s that were present with the blue “T”. The cumulative scores of the two games were shown to the subjects to drive competitive spirit, thus intensifying their attentiveness.
Based on the detected P-300 signals in the subjects’ recorded EEG, the researchers were able to predict the attentiveness of the ADHD subjects and conclude that the attention training with NFB could not only reduce ADHD symptoms but also promote academic performance considerably.
Neurofeedback training in Virtual Reality (VR)
The researchers attributed the decent performance of their experiment to its children-friendly and easy-to-use setup that the literature has had difficulty establishing. In particular, the researchers emphasized the advantage of VR in constructing a desirable experiment environment. VR classroom, a setting to which children are exposed almost every day, provides a real-life and naturalistic environment where subjects can forget the controlled test lab environment. Also, the researchers could handily simulate distractions such as the car driving by outside the window or a bunch of colorful hula-hoops in a fully controlled environment.
VR-integrated NFB is not a mere alternative to commonly known ADHD treatments but is gaining huge traction as the next frontier for psychological and cognitive disorder treatment:
VR therapy significantly reduces the severity of PTSD symptoms and results in rapid extinction. The findings also suggested combining VR and EEG biofeedback as a potential treatment for stress-related disorders. It is because real-time neurophysiological data such as serum cortisol levels, heart rate variability and mid-frontal alpha EEG asymmetry may provide useful inputs for adjusting VR exposure therapy protocols to enhance stress resilience or accelerate treatment response. (Dare To Explore: VR Helps You Conquer Your Fear)
VR-integrated NFB opens up opportunities for noninvasive and drug-free treatment with almost no side-effects and increased control of experimental environments.
A key bottleneck for VR-integrated Neurofeedback
Despite a promising future that VR-integrated NFB can deliver, there is a critical bottleneck at stake: accuracy. Two aspects need to be considered in establishing NFB system with high accuracy: how robustly are EEG signals acquired and how well are EEG signals and VR contents synchronized in times series. Taking account of these two aspects will ensure the high accuracy of NFB system and therefore provide more reliable and personalized treatment for various psychological disorders.
LooxidVR can help alleviate the bottleneck. Embedded with EEG sensors and eye tracking cameras, LooxidVR helps researchers acquire the user’s robust EEG signals by employing processing algorithm to eliminate unwanted noises. Most importantly, LooxidVR facilitates time synchronized acquisition of eye tracking data, EEG signals, and stimuli so that researchers can obtain correlated data-sets from different modalities.
Interested in VR-integrated neurofeedback for treating mental disorders? Embrace the opportunity with LooxidVR.
LooxidVR pre-orders start on February 1st, 2018. If you are interested in learning more, please visit our website at www.looxidlabs.com.
