Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) treatment faces accessibility challenges, despite effective exposure therapy. Conventional visual Virtual Reality (VR) often involves complex content creation, specific devices, and high costs. To overcome this, we propose Auditional Virtual Reality (Auditional VR), using only acoustic stimuli for PTSD treatment. Our Auditional VR system is clinically applied as a home-based exposure task within Prolonged Exposure Therapy. It offers rapid, tailored treatment by reproducing sounds eliciting traumatic anxiety in a safe environment. We have successfully synthesized therapeutic sounds for 12 cases covering diverse traumas (e.g., traffic accidents, domestic violence), with preliminary observations suggesting anxiety reduction and improved dissociative amnesia. Currently, creating these sounds is manual and time-consuming. To automate, we developed an Auditional VR synthesis system utilizing generative AI (LLMs) and game engines (Unity). This system interprets natural language to automatically generate immersive soundscapes, proposing sound selection, spatial arrangements, and timings. Preliminary evaluations show human-modified, AI-generated scenarios yield higher-quality audio faster than fully automated methods. This presentation emphasizes the critical innovation of synthesizing clinically applicable auditory stimuli. Our Auditional VR, enhanced by automation, holds significant potential for expanding accessible and effective PTSD treatment.
Zempo et al. (2025) studied this question.