Everyday Locations as Cues to Smoke: Personalized Environments in Virtual Reality to Elicit Smoking Cravings

Smoking is a leading risk factor negatively impacting the health of people, not only those partaking in it first-hand, but also to those around them. Different methods are available to assist people with quitting smoking, with various degrees of effectiveness. Researchers developing smoking cessation approaches would like to have controlled environments to test how effective they are before offering them as viable options. Virtual reality has been demonstrated to be an efficacious tool for facilitating the presentation of cues aimed at eliciting smoking cravings in the lab. Addiction, however, is a complex matter involving different parts of the brain, and how or when conditioned responses causing smoking cravings are activated depend on the individual in question. There are strong indications that personalization of smoking cues, or in other words using elements relevant in the addiction model of an individual, may elicit higher or at least consistent smoking cravings. The general aim is that developing smoking cessation approaches targeting those most relevant elements may have higher ecological validity and therefore be more effective in assisting people both with quitting smoking and maintaining that behavior change. To assist researchers with testing their smoking cessation approaches using a virtual coach, we have created a system enabling the presentation of virtual environments and facilitating communication between researchers and participants while the latter are viewing them. We have evaluated the effectiveness of our system in eliciting a familiar experience, which we posit is a major component tied to smoking cravings. Our results showed that personalized virtual environments elicited a more familiar experience than non-personalized ones. We also examined the usability of our developed user interface, as well as the sense of presence elicited by our system, both of which received positive scores.