Cognitive Neurosciences Master Students Suggest VR Technology for Psychotherapy

14:03, February 3, 2021

Young future professionals took part in the event of the Sirius advanced education center

Anastasia Butorova and Alexandra Kosachenko, graduate students of the Cognitive Neurosciences Master Program, together with the high school students-participants of the Sirius educational center, implemented two projects: they created a new tool for psychotherapists, which facilitates the rehabilitation of the patient after living events, and developed a system to track employee cognitive overload.

As part of a post-traumatic rehabilitation project, several virtual reality scenes were developed to recreate real stress situations. With the help of such a tool, patients can undergo recovery under supervision and with the accompaniment of a psychotherapist or psychologist.

“In the system with immersion in virtual reality, we decided to use the technique of desensitization with reprocessing of eye movements and the stepwise exposure method so that the patient remains involved in the therapy process and avoids the risk of retraumatization,” Anastasia Butorova and Alexandra Kosachenko say. "The result of the project will be to improve the condition of people with PTSD after immersion in VR process."

To develop a system for tracking the cognitive overload of employees, the parameter of the human pupil diameter was used. The undergraduates, together with high school students, conducted observations of Sirius mentors, selected a neural network model that supposedly most accurately predicts cognitive overload, and wrote a telegram bot that can notify an employee about the occurrence of an overload and send information about this to the management.

“Our undergraduates are distinguished by the fact that they are not only successful students, but also talented employees of the Laboratory of Neurotechnologies, which is a part of the Ural Institute for the Humanities,” says Dr. Marina Klimenskikh, head of the Master's degree program “Cognitive Neurosciences”. “We are proud that our students are actively involved in both scientific and educational activities, as in the case of a project shift at Sirius. They do an excellent job with schoolchildren, although building communication in a team, motivating teenagers for a result can be difficult. And by their example they, of course, attract applicants who see how interesting and multifaceted life can be at the UrFU Ural Institute of Humanities. "