For ADHD, it impairs one's ability to get
their work done, it really interferes
with their ability to listen to the
teacher in a classroom or do their
homework, so what we really need to do is
learn to teach people to learn to ignore
distractions, so teach them to learn to
enhance their attention and medications
don't do that,
and I started thinking why can't we
do that with virtual reality?
Ok, you ready?
Yeah.
Here we go.
So what we've created is a
virtual classroom. So they're sitting in
a classroom and they look around, and
there's children behind them and there's
children in front of them, and every once
in a while while they're doing the math
test or these other attention kinds of
tasks, there's a child leaning over and
talking to another one, which can be
very distracting. Another child might
drop their pencil. Typical distractions
one might encounter in a classroom.
So the idea is that while they're doing
their work, they can also be exposed to
these distractions and learn to ignore them.
I probably got a few answers wrong
because of it, but not that many.
So at this point what the therapy entails is
that they have a practice session here and
we're using eye-tracking so we can gauge
whether or not they're distracted, then
they take home with them, they take a
virtual reality headset and a cell phone
that we give them and they're instructed
to practice about 20 minutes a day for
about twenty five sessions.
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Ultimately
we want to assess whether this changes
their behavior in the classroom or at
home, so we're also taking rating scale
measures because that's the beauty of
virtual reality is that it should
transfer to real settings and so we want
to assess whether there actually is a
change in the real setting.
