Design of Virtual Reality Games for eHealth: Immersive Exercises to Reduce Anxiety

The increase in the prevalence of mental health issues, especially anxiety and depressive disorders, has encouraged research focused on the benefits brought by emergent technologies as psychotherapy tools. Our current paper showcases the potential brought by virtual reality for digital health, and in particular for psychotherapy. We are focusing on the design process of various immersive virtual reality (VR) exercises for anxiety reduction, describing their medical purpose, functionalities, scene design and gamification principles. We are then presenting a user experience experiment comparing VR interaction practices in an anxiety management exercise in order to understand the following steps needed to implement the proposed exercises.