Date of Award

6-14-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2018.

Department

Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Ahmed Amer

Abstract

A person’s resilience to adversity and trauma is developed early on in his or her childhood. When parents display stress in front or neglect emotions of their children consistently, their children will form neural connections between areas of pain and stress. It is important to educate parents to properly handle children’s emotions and also control their own emotions and mindfulness during these interactions.

We developed an iOS VR application accompanied by a Google Cardboard and a Mio Alpha fitness watch to record and display the stress level of the parent using his/her heart rate data. The progress of the users can be sent back to researchers for further study and also evaluation. This system allows parents to interact with a VR child to develop empathy, along with training their own emotional intelligence. Users can also view an intense scene of a VR parent displaying negative emotions in the child’s perspective. This system will eventually be used as an educational tool in the Resilient Families Program in San Jose. In the future, more complex interactions can be achieved by adding animation assets, and also increased accuracy in stress sensing by replacing the heart rate monitor with a more accurate biometric system.

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