Virtual Reality for Training Diagnostic Skills in Anorexia Nervosa: A Usability Assessment

Virtual Reality (VR) technology is used in clinical psychology to integrate and enhance traditional assessment and therapeutic approaches for a variety of conditions. It is also increasingly used in the training of health professionals, as it provides authentic recreations of real-life settings, without exposing students to situations for which they are not yet prepared. VR systems involve different graphical user interfaces for human-computer interaction that vary according to the level of immersion required. In this study, we explore the interaction between level of immersion and gender, in order to establish whether the differences in usability between men and women found in previous studies are modulated by the level of immersion of the VR devices used to perform the simulations. Seventy undergraduate students (44 women, 26 men) participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one of the two following conditions: differential diagnosis skills training using simulated interviews with an immersive system, or training using the simulated interviews with a non-immersive system. The results showed that men rated the usability of immersive and non-immersive systems to be almost the same, while women assessed the usability of the nonimmersive system to be higher. A greater proneness to motion sickness in women is proposed as a hypothesis to explain these differences; this hypothesis should now be tested in further studies.