CravingProbe: A System Combining Virtual Reality and Biofeedback Technologies to Assist Drug Psychotherapy Chieh-Jui Ho ∗ National Tsing Hua University jerryjp3914@gapp.nthu.edu.tw Chi-Ting Hou ∗ National Tsing Hua University dafdafdaf0411@gapp.nthu.edu.tw Min-Wei Hung ∗ National Tsing Hua University mwhung@mx.nthu.edu.tw Chien Wen (Tina) Yuan National Taiwan Normal University tinayuan@ntnu.edu.tw Nanyi Bi National Taiwan University nanyi.bi@gmail.com Ming-Chyi Huang Taipei City Hospital Songde Branch mch@tpech.gov.tw Chuang-Wen You National Tsing Hua University cwyou@mx.nthu.edu.tw ABSTRACT Virtual Reality has demonstrated its potential in drug psychother- apy. However, there is little research on the design space of VR experience combined with biofeedback in clinical settings for drug addiction that is aligned with treatment goals. We designed a pro- totype system, called CravingProbe, combining VR and biofeedback technologies to assist drug psychotherapy, and recruited three psy- chotherapists for a pilot user study to share their feedback from therapeutic perspectives. Results show that participants agreed that the system illustrates most of the typical real-life craving episodes and useful to discuss potential cravings experienced by patients. And, participants expressed willingness to and felt capable of using this system during drug psychotherapy. CCS CONCEPTS · Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile com- puting systems and tools. KEYWORDS Virtual Reality; Biofeedback; Psychotherapy; Drug Addiction ACM Reference Format: Chieh-Jui Ho, Chi-Ting Hou, Min-Wei Hung, Chien Wen (Tina) Yuan, Nanyi Bi, Ming-Chyi Huang, and Chuang-Wen You. 2021. CravingProbe: A System Combining Virtual Reality and Biofeedback Technologies to Assist Drug Psychotherapy. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp-ISWC ’21 Adjunct), September 21–26, 2021, Virtual, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460418.3480159 ∗ These authors contributed equally to this research. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. UbiComp-ISWC ’21 Adjunct, September 21–26, 2021, Virtual, USA © 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8461-2/21/09. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3460418.3480159 1 INTRODUCTION Drug addiction is a complex disorder manifested by compulsive drug use, which would present various symptoms, such as emo- tional irritability or depression. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) [23] is one of the therapeutic approaches to efectively assist drug- addicted patients in rehabilitation. In CBT for drug addiction, ther- apists focus on guiding patients to recollect the moments when craving arise, and review the triggering factors, bodily responses, and mental experiences under the circumstances. Only when pa- tients have the capacity to identify triggering factors and improve their craving awareness can they practice self-regulation and cop- ing skills, thereby blocking the inertial relapse process at the right time. Virtual Reality (VR) has been introduced in CBT as a tool for assessment and intervention, and has demonstrated its potential in VR exposure therapy (VRET) [28]. However, in treating drug addiction, the focus is mostly on the efectiveness and validity to induce craving [13]. Moreover, integration of VR and biofeedback in HCI community has been explored specifcally in the application domain of relaxation and gaming experience. To the best of our knowledge, there is little research on the qualitative insights on the design space of VR experience combined with biofeedback in clinical settings for drug addiction that is aligned with treatment goals. Prior to this study, an interview study was conducted with psychotherapists for drug addiction treatment in regards to the issues concerning the application of VR and biofeedback in drug psychotherapy [19]. The study then proposed a preliminary system design that provides a clinical-friendly VR experience that incorpo- rates timely biofeedbackin an efort to facilitate treatment progress of drug addiction [19]. Built on prior studies, we designed a prototype system, called CravingProbe, combining virtual reality and biofeedback technolo- gies to assist drug psychotherapy, and recruited three psychother- apists for a pilot study to share their feedback from a therapeutic perspective. Results show that participants agreed that the system illustrates most of the typical real-life craving episodes and is useful to discuss potential cravings experienced by patients. And, partici- pants expressed willingness to and felt capable of using this system during drug psychotherapy. 555