Therapy in the Metaverse – Designing a Virtual Reality Therapy Platform

In the last few years, the metaverse has gained popularity for various applications, especially in gaming, social life, education, and healthcare. A crucial aspect of virtual interactions in the healthcare context is that they need to ensure the possibility of developing meaningful relationships between doctors and patients. This holds especially true for the case of virtual psychotherapy because patients need to feel safe to open up to their therapist. In this paper, we develop a design science research artifact and derive design principles from it to show how current video-based telepsychotherapy can be improved by using virtual reality for the interaction environment. We evaluate our application through qualitative patient and expert interviews. We contribute to the field of metaverse psychotherapy applications by presenting a systematic DSR approach to develop virtual reality applications for telepsychotherapy.