Towards digital therapeutics: Developing an immersive serious game for social anxiety disorder

This paper presents the engineering design and usability validation of SAVIRE (Social Anxiety-Virtual Reality-Serious Game), an immersive digital therapeutic platform for adolescents with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD).Adopting an engineering-centered approach, SAVIRE is developed using a modular system architecture that incorporates a Behavioral Scoring Engine for real-time classification of user responses during virtual social interactions. The system is implemented using Unity 3D and the Oculus SDK and optimized for the Meta Quest 3S, leveraging inside-out tracking to enable high-fidelity immersion without reliance on external computing devices. Following the Rapid Game Development (RGD) methodology, clinically grounded therapeutic principles are translated into interactive mechanics and graded virtual exposure scenarios. Technical evaluation conducted by clinical experts using the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) demonstrated positive results, with mean scores exceeding 2.67 across all dimensions, including efficiency and stimulation. Usability testing involving 20 adolescents diagnosed with SAD yielded an average System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 80.38, indicating excellent usability. These findings position SAVIRE as an engineering-oriented framework for adaptive virtual simulations, contributing to the development of scalable digital therapeutic systems in mental healthcare.