Measuring the Effectiveness of Virtual Reality for Stress Reduction: Psychometric Evaluation of the ERMES Project

Among all the technologies that make up the Digital Psychology intervention, Virtual Reality (VR) represents a decisive paradigm of innovation since it allows to work in terms of prevention and monitoring of many psychological issues, such as stress, anxiety, depression and burnout. This paper presents ERMES project “Virtual Reality to promote the well-being of vulnerable people within Hospitals", and a preliminary psychometric assessment of the results obtained from its first experimentation. Specifically, the main goal is to provide a tool that can act on stress levels by practicing Mindfulness sessions, virtual museum exploration, and Art Therapy activities, with the possibility of safely sharing the experience with other patients. During the experimental phase, clinical interviews and psychometric tests were carried out in order to assess the impact of VR therapy after participating in the experimental protocol. This first analysis shows significant changes in the stress levels, that have to be confirmed by the biosignals data acquired during the experimentation, that still needs to be evaluated.