This study set out investigate what Kind of changes would be caused to the craving of alcohol dependent patients by stimuli through virtual reality in the preparation stage for drinking refusal training. With regard to stimulation, it included alcohol...
This study set out investigate what Kind of changes would be caused to the craving of alcohol dependent patients by stimuli through virtual reality in the preparation stage for drinking refusal training. With regard to stimulation, it included alcohol exposure, a positive situation, and a negative situation on the basis of drinking encouraging situations(social pressure) known as drinking stimulating situations for alcoholics. The purpose of the study is to provide fundamental materials for the development of new training programs to refuse alcohol and for the examination of the possibility of utilizing virtual reality technology as a new treatment and training tool for alcoholics. To this end, a virtual reality program was conducted involving 12 alcoholics admitted to Severance Mental Health Hospital in Gyeonggi province from December 2006 to September 2007. The data was dealt with various statistic analyses such as frequency analysis, Wilcoxon Matched-pairs Signed-Ranks Test using SPSS/WIN 11.5 The analysis results indicate that avatars encouraging drinking caused more craving than just the background, that the scenes with alcohol exposed caused more craving than the scenes with no alcohol exposed, and that there were no significant changes to craving according to a positive or negative situation. The results confirmed that training sessions using virtual reality presented a situation and environment of drinking pressure that's similar to the actual social pressure and that the virtual reality approach had enormous potential as an effective treatment tool when combined with the existing treatment techniques.