Although this paper is mainly about cognitive therapy and anxiety rather than autism or airports, it has a lot of crossover with my project. It introduces Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) and explores how VR can be combined with physiological data such as heart rate, HRV, EEG and EDA to create personalised, adaptive experiences. It also briefly mentions applications involving autism spectrum disorders.
The most useful idea is that VR can respond to the person rather than remaining static. Physiological signals can be monitored in real time and used to change elements of the virtual environment depending on the user's emotional state.
The paper describes VR as “safe, highly controllable, repeatable, and private.” These qualities are particularly relevant to airport environments, which can be unpredictable, crowded and difficult to recreate repeatedly for testing. VR could allow noise, crowds, lighting or other sensory factors to be introduced gradually and altered depending on the individual.
Another useful argument is that VR does not necessarily need to be better than real-world exposure. One study describes it instead as a more practical and versatile method where real situations are difficult or expensive to recreate. This could help justify using simulated airport environments.
A major connection to my project is the use of biofeedback. Heart rate, HRV, EEG, EDA and breathing can be monitored instead of relying only on somebody verbally explaining how anxious or overwhelmed they feel. The paper describes this as moving beyond subjective self-report and creating a dynamic feedback loop between the user's physiological state and the VR environment.
This could be particularly interesting for my autism research, but I would need a separate autism-specific source before arguing that autistic adults have particular difficulty identifying or communicating these internal states.
A useful example in the paper is Agora-VR, where crowd noise and illumination are automatically changed according to heart-rate feedback. This feels particularly relevant to an airport-based sensory environment.
Traditional imagined exposure relies on somebody being able to visualise a feared situation. The paper notes that not everybody can do this effectively, whereas VR can create a multisensory experience without relying completely on imagination.
This might connect to autism, but again I need an autism-specific source before claiming that difficulty visualising is particularly common among autistic adults.
Traditional VRET normally works by putting somebody into a controlled simulation, deliberately exposing them to anxiety-provoking stimuli and helping them gradually regulate their response.
My idea may be different.
I am potentially looking at somebody who is already inside a real airport and beginning to become overwhelmed, with technology detecting this change and then helping them regulate.
So my project might eventually be better described as adaptive VR, biofeedback-responsive VR, or an immersive sensory regulation intervention, rather than VRET. This is something I need to establish through further research.