Principal Investigators:

Alberto Greco - Università degli Studi di Pisa

Manuela Chessa - Università degli Studi di Genova

Anxiety is the main symptom of the most spread cluster of mental disorders – i.e., anxiety disorders. Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD; formerly known as social phobia) was particularly worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anxiety is often manifested in terms of avoidance of any aversive situation (e.g., crowded places, or interactive events). An objective assessment of avoidance behaviors is fundamental to diagnosing SAD and measuring therapeutic outcomes.

In BRAVE, we aim to develop biofeedback-based personalised virtual reality exposure therapies for this kind of anxiety disorders.
 

Publications:

Martini, M., Viola, E., Bossi, F., Frumento, S., Iannizzotto, A., Said, S., ... & Chessa, M. (2024, October). Designing an immersive virtual reality scenario for social anxiety elicitation and modeling: a preliminary evaluation. In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Metrology for eXtended Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Engineering (MetroXRAINE) (pp. 435-440). IEEE.

The immersive VR scenario developed for the first phase of BRAVE has won the best demo prize at 2024 IEEE International Conference on Metrology for eXtended Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Engineering (MetroXRAINE)