Resumen de Social skills training for schizophrenia patients using virtual reality
The purpose of this PhD research is to design and test a new virtual reality tool to improve social skills in patients who suffer from schizophrenia. Psychosocial interventions focusing on the improvement of social skills are protocol-driven (based on their target behaviours), used to be administered in group format and delivered in the clinical setting. However, its impact to the patient¿s rehabilitation process can be improved by the inclusion of new technologies, such as Virtual Reality: it allows the clinician to deliver the therapy in one-to-one sessions, permits a direct practice of the skills using real-time interactions with virtual agents and under the therapist¿s supervision, and it increases the generalisation of learned responses to the patient¿s daily life.
The project consisted of several stages prior to the implementation of the software in the clinical setting 1) design and testing of a new cognitive-behavioural social skills training protocol for stabilised outpatients suffering from schizophrenia, 2) design and development of social virtual environments and embodied conversational agents which to be included in the virtual reality-integrated program (based on the previously proposed protocol) as well as their testing on non-clinical population and, 3) the implementation of the VR program in the clinical setting with a subsequent pilot study to test its effectiveness. Thus, five experimental studies were carried out to test preliminary hypothesis regarding each project¿s stage. Results derived from these researches have been published in indexed journals with impact factor (ISI).
The key clinical and scientific contributions of the present doctoral thesis have been: the proposed brief cognitive-behavioural SST has been proved to be efficacious for improving social cognition and poor social functioning in stabilised outpatients suffering from schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder; both virtual characters and virtual social interactions were shown to be reliable and feasible methods to present emotional stimuli and to evoke social responses in non-clinical subjects; the virtual reality-integrated program, the Soskitrain, showed is effectiveness as an adjunct technique to the individualised intervention to improve social skills in outpatients suffering from schizophrenia, as well as for the implementation of new social behaviour in the patients¿ everyday life.
