BATON ROUGE — An LSU professor and his team are using virtual reality headsets and noise-canceling headphones to help students with ADHD stay focused on their schoolwork.

Associate Professor David Shepherd said he hopes that this will be able to treat ADHD without the use of medication. 
Shepherd's team is comprised of LSU grad students, as well as collaborators from Rutgers University and the University of Zurich. The study is being funded by the National Institute for Mental Health. 

Shepherd told WBRZ that the original target for the study wasn't students. 

"We were trying to help high-end office workers be more productive, so that was kind of our initial idea. That was a cool project, but it was just kind of a side project," Shepherd said.

The idea to help students with ADHD began when Shepherd's team was working with an undergrad student who had ADHD. The student said he lived with four roommates and said it was pretty hard to focus at their place. The student asked if they could use the VR headset to study. 

They realized they found the right group. They began helping students with ADHD to stay focused while using computers for work.

"What VR is actually really good for is blocking out things. You put this big thing on your face; you can't see anything. You put your headset on; you can't hear anything. So the entire outside world is totally blocked," Shepherd said. 

The virtual reality headset and headphones create an optimal work environment by blocking out auditory and visual distractions. The headset also has a port that connects a computer screen to the VR session. That way, the person wearing the headset can see their computer screen in virtual reality. 

LSU student Jayden Armstrong told WBRZ he liked a virtual stop light that the program uses that signals if someone is not focusing on their task at hand.

"The stoplight will go from green, yellow, to red. Green means you're doing good. Red means that you have to do something more than do nothing, and so that extra motivation was good for me," Armstrong said. 

"We are doing it in conjunction with Rutgers University. The only other thing that's happening with VR and ADHD is that people are using it for diagnosis. They put you in a virtual classroom, and they see how distracted you get when kids are doing this. So they use it for diagnosis, but we're the only ones using it for actual treatment. To help you get better," Shepherd said. 

Shepherd's team has done several trials in the study. Last year, they had 25 students participate. Each participant did at least 10 one-hour VR sessions at their dorm or house, giving the team over 250 hours of data they could analyze. 

"This year, we're doing a trial that's even bigger. We're going to do 45 to 50 students, and that's going to be 12 sessions. If the data looks good, which it so far is looking good, we will trial with like hundreds of students," Shepherd said.