Visual Attention and Pulmonary VR Training System for Children With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common behavioral disorders in children in the early school years. This study proposes a novel virtual reality (VR) training system that simultaneously improves visual attention and pulmonary function in children with ADHD using fast Pranayama breathing, which is similar to the breathing method used to measure pulmonary function. We conducted the experiment with 12 children with ADHD who have normal pulmonary function in the control group and the experimental group, using the developed visual attention and pulmonary VR training system for eight training sessions in four weeks. The proposed system for children with ADHD consists of hardware that measures breathing and three VR games that use breathing data as direct input. The experiment result was analyzed by the Paired t-test for the pre-post comparisons and the Unpaired t-test for intergroup comparisons. Based on the conducted experiments and observations, we confirmed that the developed system can simultaneously improve visual attention and breathing capacity in children with ADHD.