Salvatore Adalberto Esposito
Towards Intelligent Virtual Exposure Therapy: A Pilot Study on an Imitation-Learning-Based AI Therapist within the BRAVE Project.
Rel. Gabriella Olmo, Vito De Feo. Politecnico di Torino, Master of science program in Computer Engineering, 2025
Abstract
This thesis explores the development of an AI-driven therapeutic agent within the BRAVE project, an early-stage initiative aimed at advancing Virtual Exposure Therapy (VRET) for Specific Phobia. The project recreates phobic scenarios through Unity-based virtual reality environments while employing Multimotion, a machine learning system that processes biosignals collected during sessions to predict patient emotional states in real-time. This emotional monitoring supports therapists in their clinical decision-making, with the ultimate goal of training an AI agent capable of learning therapeutic strategies through observation of expert clinician behavior during VRET sessions. In my thesis I conducted a pilot feasibility study for developing an imitation learning-based AI agent capable of acting as a virtual therapist during exposure therapy sessions for patients affected by Aviophobia.
Given the absence of real clinical data at this early project stage, I adopted a different approach: a synthetic therapy session dataset was generated using Large Language Models (LLMs)
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