CONTENTS

KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING: PRINCIPLES AND TECHNIQUES
Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering,
Principles and Techniques, KEPT2009
Cluj-Napoca (Romania), July 2–4, 2009, pp. 254–257
VIRTUAL REALITY REHABILITATION ENVIRONMENT FOR
OBSESSIVE–COMPULSIVE DISORDER
SORIN JIBOTEAN (1) AND RARES FLORIN BOIAN (2)
Abstract. Medical rehabilitation often employs virtual environments due to
their flexibility, safety and low costs. The applications of virtual reality in rehabilitation
ranges from post-surgery or stroke therapy to ADHD or phobias. The
paper presents a virtual environment developed to train obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD) patients to focus on the task at hand without trying to first arrange
everything to a perceived perfect pattern. The application is based on reports
of high school results and exam behavior of otherwise good students who suffer
from OCD.
1. Introduction and Approach
Medical rehabilitation often employs virtual environments due to their flexibility,
safety and low costs. The applications of virtual reality in rehabilitation ranges
from post-surgery or stroke therapy [1] to attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD) [2, 3] or phobias treatments.
Patient suffering of obsessive-compulsive disorder display symptoms such as: fear
of contamination or dirt, having things orderly and symmetrical, or recurrent and
persistent thoughts and impulses [4, 5]. Based on reports from the Pediatric Psychiatric
Hospital in Cluj–Napoca, high school students suffering on OCD, often fail
exams due their focus on arranging things in a perfect pattern instead of focusing on
the test or exam subjects.
The application develop is aimed to training such students to focus on the exam
subjects while ignoring the lack of pattern of the environment. Following the exposure
therapy approach, the virtual reality application, requires the patient to take an exam
in a virtual classroom.
2. Related Work
The applications of virtual reality in the medical field is a very active and extensively
investigates subject. The closest work to that present in this paper has been
done by Rizzo et al. [2] with the Virtual Classroom project for studying ADHD in
children. Their virtual environment places the patient in a classroom and presents
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 68U05, 68U35, 68U01.
Key words and phrases. virtual reality, virtual rehabilitation, exposure therapy.
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c○2009 Babe¸s-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca