Effects of virtual reality and music therapy on academic stress reduction using a mobile application.

Abstract

In recent years, music therapy has proven to be an effective strategy to reduce stress. This research examines the effects of applying a social support strategy to reduce stress levels in students of higher education students, by com-bining music therapy with the use of immersive virtual reality, making use of a mobile application. This proposal implements a system that performs the follow-ing tasks: i) collects information on the emotions of the participants through a facial recognition module, ii) provides a relaxation experience within an ani-mated and musicalized virtual environment, iii) measures stress levels, through the application of a psychology stress questionnaire, and iv) evaluates the effects produced on the user. Experiments were carried out with the participation of sev-eral students from Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas-ESPE. Results show that the use of music therapy, combined with virtual reality, could be a powerful strat-egy to decrease stress by up to 50%.