In 2023, an estimated 15.5 million of American adults over the age of 18 had a diagnosis of ADHD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Half of those diagnosis happened in adulthood.
Computer science and engineering associate professor David Shepherd is out to change that — or at least help make completing tasks, assignments and homework easier for students.
Nestled in the digital media center at LSU, at the end of a long hallway lined with glass offices chock full of charts, graphs, equations and scribbled ideas in dry-erase ink, sits Shepherd's virtual reality lab where he works with two doctorate students.
This November, the team of three received a total of $1.8 million in grant funding to continue to study how virtual reality spaces can assist students with ADHD in completing their homework and staying on task. The overall grant is in collaboration with Joshua Langberg, Rutgers University chief wellness officer and Department of Clinical Psychology professor.
The study is a clinical trial, combining efforts with the LSU Student Health Center to find 200 students to participate.
Originally from Richmond, Virginia, Shepherd and Langberg came up with the idea to use virtual reality to increase the productivity of software engineers at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2020. It wasn't until a student with ADHD noted the possible benefits of the program for doing homework and staying focused that the team switched focus.
"Software engineers get interrupted all of the time," Shepherd said. "We thought VR headsets could make it so that even if (software engineers) are working in open cubicles, they're not that interrupted."
The virtual reality space was created to reflect a good working environment with a simulation of a computer screen with only the current assignments and tasks visible on the screen.
Shepherd brought the program with him to LSU when he joined the university two years ago. Now, two doctoral students work with him to sort through new case studies, address glitches in the gaming-like system and compile data from homework sessions.
How it works
The virtual reality program uses coding to detect when students are going off-focus in multiple one-hour study sessions. The technology tracks keyboard strokes, mouse activity and eye movement to track productivity.
The first 10 minutes of each study session begin with reading comprehension and a series of questions about the content in order to gauge the level of productivity a student has going into the session. For the next 40 minutes, students are doing their actual homework on an uninterrupted screen. No notifications. No pop-ups. No ads. No opportunities to get distracted.
According to Shepherd, students cannot use the virtual reality goggles for more than two sessions in one day.
"It defeats the purpose," he said.
Another unofficial symptom of ADHD is hyper fixation — an intense focus on one topic, activity, food or television show that can cause a person to become oblivious to the passing of time.
It's also common for students with ADHD to zone out, or day dream, when trying to focus.
"That's pretty easy to detect because there's no keyboard, no mouse activity," Shepherd said. "If you have the headset on, we can detect that nothing is happening. We look for that in order to nudge them back on track."
At the end of the session, there is a self-reported survey to assess a student's concentration, motivation and effort.
"We plan to compare the self-reported data to the objective data that we collect on our end," Shepherd said.
Fatemeh Jamalinabijan is the data collector. She looks at screenshots taken every minute of each session. The grant's aim is to get 200 students with ADHD to participate in the clinical trial at the end of a three-year period. That's 2,400 one-hour sessions and 144,000 screenshots to look over.
Matheus Costas created the study work environment and finds and fixes bugs in the system if the need arises.
"They both put some blood, sweat and tears into this project," Shepherd said.
Going forward, if the clinical trial proves to be a success, Shepherd predicts that it could become an accommodation provided by some universities for students with ADHD.
"If you are in a dorm room especially, you could have one of these VR sets to make your homework situation better," he said. "The headsets are just going to get lighter and higher-res. I think that's going to be a legitimate avenue of getting homework done in a noisy place within a year or two."
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