Bekele E, Bian D, Peterman J, Park S, Sarkar N
IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng. 2017 Jun;25(6):739-749. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2016.2591556. Epub 2016 Jul 14.
Schizophrenia is a life-long, debilitating psychotic disorder with poor outcome that affects about 1% of the population. Although pharmacotherapy can alleviate some of the acute psychotic symptoms, residual social impairments present a significant barrier that prevents successful rehabilitation. With limited resources and access to social skills training opportunities, innovative technology has emerged as a potentially powerful tool for intervention. In this paper, we present a novel virtual reality (VR)-based system for understanding facial emotion processing impairments that may lead to poor social outcome in schizophrenia. We henceforth call it a VR System for Affect Analysis in Facial Expressions (VR-SAAFE). This system integrates a VR-based task presentation platform that can minutely control facial expressions of an avatar with or without accompanying verbal interaction, with an eye-tracker to quantitatively measure a participants real-time gaze and a set of physiological sensors to infer his/her affective states to allow in-depth understanding of the emotion recognition mechanism of patients with schizophrenia based on quantitative metrics. A usability study with 12 patients with schizophrenia and 12 healthy controls was conducted to examine processing of the emotional faces. Preliminary results indicated that there were significant differences in the way patients with schizophrenia processed and responded towards the emotional faces presented in the VR environment compared with healthy control participants. The preliminary results underscore the utility of such a VR-based system that enables precise and quantitative assessment of social skill deficits in patients with schizophrenia.
精神分裂症是一种终身性、使人衰弱的精神障碍，预后较差，影响着约1%的人口。尽管药物治疗可以缓解一些急性精神病症状，但残留的社会功能障碍是阻碍成功康复的重大障碍。由于资源有限且获得社交技能培训机会的途径较少，创新技术已成为一种潜在的强大干预工具。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于虚拟现实（VR）的系统，用于理解可能导致精神分裂症患者社会预后不良的面部情绪加工障碍。我们将其称为面部表情情感分析VR系统（VR-SAAFE）。该系统集成了一个基于VR的任务呈现平台，该平台可以在有或没有伴随言语互动的情况下精细控制虚拟化身的面部表情，还配备了一个眼动仪以定量测量参与者的实时注视，以及一组生理传感器来推断其情感状态，以便基于定量指标深入了解精神分裂症患者的情绪识别机制。对12名精神分裂症患者和12名健康对照者进行了一项可用性研究，以检查他们对情绪面孔的加工情况。初步结果表明，与健康对照参与者相比，精神分裂症患者在处理和应对VR环境中呈现的情绪面孔的方式上存在显著差异。初步结果强调了这种基于VR的系统的实用性，它能够精确且定量地评估精神分裂症患者的社交技能缺陷。
