Project’s start!
The BRAVE project gets its funding and can official start
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Meta Quest 3 VR headset
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The visual report of anxiety in the virtual scenario
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To give a continuous report of social anxiety
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100 volunteers so far
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Yep, you are right: this is Pisa’s Leaning Tower!
What is Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD)
A mental disorder whose raising is worrying the whole world: according to the U.S. General Surgeon, Social Anxiety represents the “new epidemic” following exacerbated by the social restrictions made necessary to contain COVID and by the abuse of socials & smartphones
What are exposure therapies
Treatments based on the exposure to the feared situations, representing the gold standard for many anxiety disorders (including Social Anxiety Disorder). They have a high efficacy, but are not accepted by most of patients (in particular the most severe ones, who would benefit them the most)
What is the adaptive VR scenario we aim at building
It is a virtual reality that changes accordingly with the biofeedback-based estimation of the anxiety felt by who is immersed in it, to adjust its emotional intensity and maintain it in an optimal range maximizing both efficacy and tolerability.
Let us introduce ourselves
A few words about us
We are a multidisciplinary team made by informatics (building the virtual scenario), bioengineers (analyzing the data), and psychologists (interpreting the results).
We are affiliated to the University of Pisa (Psychology and Biomedical Engineering) and to the University of Genova (Informatics), but we disseminated our results at international conferences in Milan (MetroXRAINE 2023), London (MetroXRAINE 2024), and Crete (MeMeA 2025).
How we want to make science
Our vision
Science should be open, freely accessible to everyone, and made to improve everyone’s life. That’s why all our research products are being shared on open repositories such as GitHub and Open Science Framework!
We do not want to leave our precious work to rot in some researcher’s PC, but rather we aim at spreading it to the world: our greater satisfaction will be to see that the tools we developed are being used somewhere else by other enthusiast researchers and clinicians.
* this person has a formal role in the BRAVE project. Other team members have been involved through roles specified in the related scientific paper(s)
Our multidisciplinary team from the Universities of Pisa and of Genova
Alberto Greco*
Associate Professor, University of Pisa
Biomedical Engineer and principal investigator of the BRAVE project. His expertise is on the analysis of psychophysiological signals
Manuela Chessa*
Associate Professor, University of Genova
Based on her background in bioengineering and informatics, she coordinates the development of virtual scenarios to induce social anxiety
Danilo Menicucci*
Associate Professor, University of Pisa
Associate Professor in Neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pisa, he coordinates the psychological component of the project
Sergio Frumento*
Post-doc researcher, University of Pisa
With a PhD in Psychophysiology, he won the post-doc position funded by BRAVE‘s budget to organize and co-conduct the project’s experiments
Matteo Martini*
PhD student, University of Genova
He is gaining his PhD in Informatics working also on the BRAVE project‘s virtual scenarios and helping in the data collection, organizing experimental sessions in Genova’s University
Enrico Cipriani*
Post-doc researcher, University of Pisa
After completing his PhD in Psychophysiology, Enrico joined the BRAVE team supporting the design and implementation of experimental protocols.
Marco Pardini
Phd student, University of Pisa
With a background in Artificial Intelligence and Data Engineering, he is involved in the design and development of the AI models used on signals coming from the experiments.
Gianluca Rho
Post-doc researcher, University of Pisa
Biomedical engineer and postDoc researcher. His expertises include biomedical signal processing, with a focus on the peripheral autonomic correlates involved in the BRAVE project
Sara Said
Psychologist, University of Pisa
Psychologist in training graduated in Clinical and Health Psychology at the University of Pisa. For her thesis project she contributed to the recruitment of BRAVE’s study participants and the co-conduction of the experiments.
Martina Alaimo
Psychologist, University of Pisa
She holds a Master’s degree in Psychology and conducted experimental sessions as part of the BRAVE project, which was the focus of her thesis work
140 thousand €
Research Budget
100 volunteers
involved so far in the experiments
24 months
of project’s duration
13 persons
Professors, post-docs, PhD, students
Designing an Immersive Virtual Reality Scenario for Social Anxiety Elicitation and Modeling: A Preliminary Evaluation
Martini, Viola, Bossi, Frumento, Iannizzotto, Said, Callara, Solari, Scilingo, Greco, Menicucci, Chessa
We describe an immersive Virtual Environment (VE) designed and developed to record physiological and behavioral data to identify a computational model for real-time subjective anxiety estimation.
The VE represents a waiting room with several chairs. Virtual Reality (VR) avatars come into the room and sit around the subject, sitting each in one of the available chairs, following two different strategies. Different forms of interaction between the avatars and the subject have been implemented.
This paper presents preliminary tests of the VE conducted with 24 healthy volunteers self-reporting possible symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder, who were invited to continuously report their subjective level of discomfort through the VR controller.
Once integrated with the answers given to questionnaires aimed at investigating anxiety states and immersiveness in the VE, these preliminary results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scenario as a novel and useful tool for robustly eliciting and assessing states of social anxiety in a realistic but nevertheless controllable and acceptable way.
Classifying Social Anxiety Disorder through Continuous Self-Reported Anxiety in a Virtual Reality Waiting Room
Pardini, Frumento, Martini, Rho, Vatteroni, Tharun, Alaimo, Galatolo, De Marinis, Scilingo, Menicucci, Cimino, Chessa, Greco
Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a mental disorder characterized by excessive fear and avoidance of social situations. Traditional assessment methods rely on retrospective self-reports, which may not fully capture moment-to-moment variations in perceived anxiety. To address this, we designed a novel virtual reality (VR) scenario to simulate a real-life social situation, specifically a waiting room that gradually fills with virtual characters.
A continuous measure of self-reported anxiety was collected via joystick throughout the VR experience, allowing for real-time monitoring of subjective social anxiety. A one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) was trained to classify individuals with SAD based on their reported anxiety trajectories. The model was evaluated using a Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) cross-validation strategy, achieving an F1-score of 0.82, recall of 0.89, and precision of 0.77, demonstrating strong classification performance.
These findings suggest that self-reported anxiety alone is a viable signal for distinguishing individuals with SAD, paving the way for more accessible, sensor-free assessment tools in virtual environments. Future work will explore advanced feature extraction from the anxiety signal, integrate physiological markers, and investigate adaptive VR scenarios that dynamically respond to user-reported distress.
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Contact us
Feel free to reach us for any need – whenever you want to (freely!) use the tools we developed, or you want us to share with you our data, or you want to interview us