The Virtual Human Breathing Coach

Abstract

Emerging technology such as Virtual Reality has been successfully explored in healthcare, including Virtual Reality Therapy in mindfulness and relaxation. However, most of these explorations lack the stimulating environment that gives users the sense of personal connection through the exchange of bodily cues with another human. We present a breathing relaxation system where a (virtual) human coach guides users' breathing to a relaxed state. Our virtual breathing coach is of a realistic human appearance, speaks in a human voice, produces human gesticulation, and displays breathing animations. Here we describe the theoretical background in human-to-human physiological entrainment and the framework of the Virtual Human Breathing Coach where the virtual coach guides users through a set of established 'Box' breathing exercises. Lastly, we will describe how we quantify the success of the system in influencing the users' breathing to a level that is prescribed by the virtual breathing coach. The application of our system ranges from remote health monitoring to self-help training that can be accessed from the comfort of our homes.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/VRW55335.2022.00095
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > School of Computer Science and Digital Technologies > Software Engineering & Cybersecurity
College of Engineering & Physical Sciences
Additional Information: © 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Event Title: 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops, VRW 2022
Event Type: Other
Event Dates: 2022-03-12 - 2022-03-16
Uncontrolled Keywords: box breathing,Breathing,breathing exercises,Human-centered computing Human computer interaction (HCI) Interaction paradigms Virtual Reality,stress,virtual agents,virtual reality in healthcare,Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design,Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition,Human-Computer Interaction,Media Technology,Modelling and Simulation
ISBN: 9781665484022
Last Modified: 25 Mar 2024 08:09
Date Deposited: 01 Jun 2022 12:03
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://ieeexpl ... ocument/9757566 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Conference contribution
Published Date: 2022-04-20
Authors: Dar, Sanobar (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-2287-7001)
Ekart, Aniko (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-6967-5397)
Bernardet, Ulysses (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-4659-3035)

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