DECISION UNDER STRESS TRAINING

DUST is a low-cost tool to help practice controlled responses to threatening situations.

People are often more impulsive and less deliberate when in stressful contexts, this is especially problematic for police officers. DUST uses a custom controller that measures diaphragm expansion to sense breathing and heart rate variability (HRV). This information about their physiological state is fed back to the player as a restriction of the visual field and a variety of other audio/visual cues.

The latest RCT demonstrates DUST can boost HRV regulation without impairing concurrent decision making while aroused. HRV upregulation trained in DUST transferred to an independent professionally relevant assessment outside VR. Police trainers have rated this training as very challenging and engaging. Moreover, 80% of them indicated that they would want to use DUST or similar products in their own teaching.

In this project, I served as Game Designer, tasked with translating cognitive behavioral and affective neuroscience techniques into actionable design strategies and game mechanics. The primary objective was to develop a game that could safely induce an arousing stress response in Dutch police officers, followed by a training protocol using heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback to help them practice stress regulation techniques.

Beyond game design, my responsibilities included product planning, development management, stakeholder alignment, and consulting on the integration of the game within the larger stress regulation intervention study conducted by the EPAN Lab at Radboud University.

in game screenshot of the player's vision getting lighter

in game screenshot of the virtual radio controls for the game

in game screenshot of the firearm reload controls for the game

in game screenshot of the virtual scene being constructed with a VR simulation effect

in game screenshot of a blue-eyed zombie being shot, dispersing into blue pixels

in game screenshot of two red-eyed zombies being shot, dispersing into red pixels

in game screenshot of a blue-eyed zombie being ignored

in game screenshot of the screen getting darker and a shot missing a zombie

in game screenshot of a zombie approaching while a fire alarm is going off

in game screenshot of a zombie attacking the player

in game screenshot of multiple zombies approaching the player, all at once

compilation of images showing administrators adjusting equipment on the player

side-by-side images of heartrate variability graphs and the player in VR headset

image of an officer wearing over the ear headphones, VR headset, and replica firearm with VR controller

in game screenshot of the player's heartrate variability graph in comparison to session events