Abstract
Virtual reality technology enables people to interact with objects in three-dimensional simulated environments. The technology has been applied in many fields such as entertainment, education, and healthcare. Health treatment applications include psycho therapeutical treatments for post-traumatic stress disorders related to driving phobias. Patents that have been filed for treating patients diagnosed with driving phobias are searched and collected using global patent platforms including Derwent Innovation's solution. Patent analytic methods, including clustering, key term frequency analysis, correlation matrix creation, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and technology function matrix mapping, are applied to analyze the patent portfolio and identify key technology development trends. The research goal is to identify patent strategies related to driving-related virtual reality psychotherapy treatment. The research identifies six technology clusters, including virtual reality technologies, vehicle driving simulations, diagnosis of driving phobia through bio-signal analysis, and artificial intelligence for health systems. Based on the cluster analysis, virtual reality related patents are increasing over the last decade. A lesser number of patents focus on virtual reality technology that includes exposure therapy for driving phobia treatment. The patent mining results show that virtual reality exposure therapy for driving phobias is still in the growth stage. There is a research gap for new treatments for driving phobias and other phobias such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which have great potential for transdisciplinary engineering research.