A novel approach to diagnose ADHD using virtual reality
International Journal of Web Information Systems
ISSN: 1744-0084
Article publication date: 6 August 2021
Issue publication date: 21 September 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The current golden standard for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis is clinical diagnosis based on psychiatric interviews and psychological examinations. This is suboptimal, as clinicians are unable to view potential patients in multiple natural settings – a necessary condition for objective diagnosis. The purpose of this paper is to improve the objective diagnosis of ADHD by analyzing a quantified representation of the actions of potential patients in multiple natural environments.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use both virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to create an objective ADHD diagnostic test. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) and ADHD Rating Scale are used to create a rule-based system of quantifiable VR-observable actions. As a potential patient completes tasks within multiple VR scenes, certain actions trigger an increase in the severity measure of the corresponding ADHD symptom. The resulting severity measures are input to an AI model, which classifies the potential patient as having ADHD in the form inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, combined or neither.
Findings
The result of this study shows that VR-observed actions can be extracted as quantified data, and classification of this quantified data achieves near-perfect sensitivity and specificity with a 98.3% accuracy rate on a convolutional neural network model.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to incorporate VR and AI into an objective DSM-5-based ADHD diagnostic test. By including stimulation to the visual, auditory and equilibrium senses and tracking movement and recording voice, we present a method to further the research of objective ADHD diagnosis.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Institute of Information and communications Technology Planning and Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (no. 2020-0-00990, Platform Development and Proof of High Trust and Low Latency Processing for Heterogeneous·Atypical·Large Scaled Data in 5G-IoT Environment).
This work (Grants No. S3031991) was supported by Business for Startup growth and technological development(TIPS Program) funded Korea Ministry of SMEs and Startups in 2020.
Citation
Son, H.M., Lee, D.G., Joung, Y.-S., Lee, J.W., Seok, E.J., Chung, T.-M. and Oh, S. (2021), "A novel approach to diagnose ADHD using virtual reality", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 17 No. 5, pp. 516-536. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-03-2021-0021
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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