Short-Term Anxiety Recognition Induced by Virtual Reality Exposure for Phobic People

In this paper, we focus our attention on the development of a virtual reality exposure system (VRE) to induce anxiety to phobic people and on a strategy for recognizing it. We describe a short term anxiety detection from blood volume pulse (BVP) measurement, we detail data collection, feature extraction and classification. We propose a model of anxiety detection using support vector machines (SVM) and evaluate it on the collected data. Results show that our model detects anxiety with a good accuracy. This study aims to support the psychologist in social anxiety diagnosis.