The sensor subsystem consists of a heart rate sensor and a breathing rate sensor. The sensor is placed on the forehead of the person who is using the VR headset. There are no visible protruding devices, making it aesthetically pleasing. The sensors are non-invasive, i.e., they do not have to be inside the patient's body to get accurate measurements.
The microcontroller subsystem consists of a preprocessing stage and a communication stage.
The data coming from the sensors can be analog or digital. In analog systems, the sensors output analog data, which needs to be converted into machine-understandable form. In the case of bio-signals, there is usually a large amount of noise. To eliminate the noise and get only the necessary data, the analog data is passed through a preprocessing stage which consists of a medical amplifier and a digital signal processing unit. This block amplifies and digitizes the analog signal. The microcontroller stores the sensor data stream to a buffer or a memory.
The communication subsystem consists of a USB controller and driver firmware. The USB controller allows the microcontroller subsystem to connect through a type C port. When the operating system of the VR headset requests sensor data from the microcontroller, the driver firmware sets up the channel and initiates data transfer.
The application-specific subsystem consists of the TotalVR app and the application that needs to use the sensor data. The diagnostic system is the application-specific software that takes user diagnostics for various purposes. The TotalVR app has Application Program Interfaces that the developers of other apps can use to request insights or sensor data. The TotalVR app communicates with the operating system of the VR device, which in turn communicates with the driver and initiates a data transfer between the microcontroller and the VR headset.
Using the user’s heart rate and breathing rate, a game can change its difficulty level to get easier or harder depending on the user’s biological response. A game would have a specific software package written that would be installed to the VR headset and would integrate with the TotalVR sensor package to receive biological readings. At key checkpoints in the gaming experience, the game would trigger a reading from the TotalVR. If this reading was higher than a certain threshold, the game would be designed to “slow” down the game to make it easier for the user to complete. On the contrary, if the reading was lower than a certain threshold, the game would be “sped” up causing more challenge to the user since based on their vital signs they can seemingly handle a little extra psychological pressure.
Exposure therapy is a method of helping a client overcome his or her fears, and is already used in VR. However, it is difficult to know how much exposure to a certain experience is too much, or too little. With our system, when a level of exposure is introduced to the client, the therapist can trigger a sensor reading from the TotalVR package. If the heart rate or breathing rate has risen to an undesired level, the therapist can back off the exposure as not to overwhelm the client. How much the exposure is adjusted would be left to the therapist’s discretion, but the application used by the therapist would be able to trigger a reading of the user’s vitals at any time by pushing a button.
This would be a particular application of the system design to treat anxiety and stress. A therapist would be offered the ability to expose a client to various “calming” environments to see which environments trigger an environmental response. Throughout the test experience, the TotalVR would use the sensor subsystem to take periodic heart rate and breathing rate measurements and store them in the memory of the microcontroller subsystem. At the end of a therapy session, when the client has been exposed to several environments, the application that has been installed to VR will generate a diagnostic report to a laptop using the data that has been stored in the microcontroller memory.