Abstract
Today, Mental health problems are getting grave and need technological
solutions. Irrational anticipated fear is Anxiety Disorder. Specific
Phobia disorders are a type of Anxiety disorder; these phobias are
rarely detected in clinical settings and are presence indicators of
other serious mental problems. VR is considered a potent tool for
treatment and diagnosis. In this study, we investigated the parameters
for predicting participants’ severity level of Cynophobia and
Astraphobia by using the following measures: “APA Specific Phobia
Severity Measure - Adult”, “Distance and Time”, “Heart Rate and
Oxygen levels for each level” in VR-specific-phobia diagnostic
environment, “symptoms” observed during experimentation, and
“causes” described by DSM-5. The “APA Specific Phobia Severity
Measure - Adult” is attributed as the standard used by psychiatrists
for clinical evaluation. We used the score of this measure to classify
instances for each participant. The other parameters serve as attributes
for predicting class, implementing the process of Data Mining. The
literature supports the prior mentioned parameters for assessing
severity levels for specific phobia. The participant walks or runs along
a road in a Virtual Reality Environment to achieve the objective. The
first scenario is a neutral environment with no phobic stimulus; the
afterward situations pose for a dog cue, thunder lightning stimulus, and
a combination of both stimulation consecutively. The ‘Distance’ traveled
and ‘Time’ taken in units for each VR scenario generated using a
Bluetooth controller is saved in a file with time stamps. The
participant subsequently fills Google Form to record the parameters. The
dataset is converted to ARFF format, and the process of Knowledge
Discovery is applied using the WEKA tool. The results suggest that the
presence of Cynophobia and Astraphobia are highly interrelated. The
study advised that Dog-Phobia severity level confidently predicts with
the parameters “Age”, “Time” in Neutral scenario, “Distance”
covered in Cynophobic scenario“, ”Difference in Oxygen levels” of
Cynophobic VRE and scenario with both (Dog and Thunder Lightning)
stimuli and “DSMAstraphobia”. The research analysis concludes that
thunder-lightning phobia severity level effectively forecasts with these
attributes: “Velocity”, “Distance” and “Time” in Neutral VRE
scenario“; ”Velocity“, ”Time” VRE scenario for both pre-mentioned
phobic stimuli; “Time” in Cynophobic scenario, “Velocity” calculated
in Astraphobic VRE, “Age” of the participant and DSMCynophobia. This
study will help in suggesting standards for diagnosing mental health
problems with the advantages of VR.