Current development of biosensing technologies towards diagnosis of mental diseases

3.4 VR-based sensors

Emerging VR applications, which are intended for navigation and orientation, cognitive and memory functions, facial identification, and other instrumental activities of daily life, have exhibited practical uses in neuropsychological assessments (García-Betances et al., 2015). Compared with the three methods mentioned in Section 3.1 and Section 3.3, more kinds of mental disease can be diagnosed through VR. VR transmits information from real life to the virtual world, providing the possibility for people to perform activities in the virtual space (Goharinejad et al., 2022). From a research perspective, the use of VR allows for the repetition of clinical practice and continuous data collection in a virtual world (Tieri et al., 2018), and provides excellent visual and auditory immersion and interaction during tasks (Climent et al., 2021). According to different degrees of immersion, VR can be divided into fully immersive, semi-immersive and non-immersive. Fully immersive VR devices are typically equipped with head-mounted displays (HMDs), data gloves, gesture control armbands, gamepads, and speakers (Figure 6), placing participants inside a virtual environment for the highest level of immersion. Semi-immersive VR presents a visual virtual environment through a relatively large flat-screen display. In non-immersive systems, participants interact using traditional PC monitors, keyboards, and mice (Kim et al., 2009; Anthes et al., 2016; Mehrfard et al., 2019; Yeung et al., 2021).