Stress-Reducing Mental Health Exercises in Mixed Reality

Sponsor: UW HCDE

Students: Lily Tiange Liu, Ziyun Tie, Amy L. Tang, Mina Ryu

HCDE master's team

This project is a continuation of Dr. Björling’s work, in which her team demonstrated the effectiveness of doing mental health exercises backed by ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) and DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) in VR environments for reducing stress amongst young adults. Initially, the goal of our work was to further explore how these exercises can be done socially in VR cater to young adult’s needs for social connections. However, informed from our research data, our team pivoted away from VR to Mixed reality, and began to explore exercises options that can be tailored to cater both individual and social needs of our users. With the goal of reducing stress in mind, our team designed an immersive room with science-backed mental health exercises that young adults can choose to exeperience in the envinronment.