Authored on 06/10/2024 - 15:29
Kategorie aktualności
„Życie Uczelni” information bulletin of the TUL

Nearly every other student experiences symptoms of depression and anxiety. As the situation gets worse, they tend to skip classes and sometimes even drop out of school to get some relief and respite from the excessive stress and fear. To address these devastating reports, researchers from the Voxel Research Lab and their international friends developed a solution that offers emergency relief to students struggling through university and facing personal day-to-day challenges.

Written by mgr inż. Agnieszka Dubiel, Institute of Mechatronics and Information Systems

Students from partner universities were given the opportunity to test the developed virtual reality applications

VRXanny is an Erasmus+ funded project that was kicked off in 2021 by a consortium made up of Universidade de Vigo (Spain), University of Tartu (Estonia), University of Lodz, and Lodz University of Technology. With their primary goal in mind, the partners focused on creating the so-called ‘chill spots’. Chill spots are to help improve the well-being of students experiencing acute, episodic and chronic stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms. In these sanctuaries of sorts, students will have the opportunity to, e.g., de-stress before an exam, relaxing in a virtual environment.

The Calm Campus Symposium (June 3 to June 5) officially concluded the project. The symposium concentrated on the essential aspects of mental health care, current state of young people's mental health, and situations and factors that tend to be the most notorious stressors for students in their daily lives. These issues were comprehensively related to the possibilities offered by  virtual reality in stress reduction.

Students from partner universities were given the opportunity to test the developed virtual reality applications during the symposium workshops. Afterwards, the participants described in detail the advantages and disadvantages of each of the four proposed scenarios. They also indicated what next steps they would like to be able to use in their daily wrestling with academic stress. Their ideas and comments provided valuable insight to the developers on how to further improve the applications and fine tune them to the expectations of this generation of students.

Voxel Research Lab had the honor of hosting prominent personalities during the event: the Vice President of the City of Łódź Adam Wieczorek, member of the Regional Assembly of the City Council of Łódź dr Monika Malinowska-Olszowy, TUL Vice Rector for Education dr hab. inż. Andrzej Romanowski, representatives of the Foundation for the Development of the Education System, Director of the Institute of Mechatronics and Information Systems dr hab inż. Łukasz Szymanski, as well as representatives of the TUL Office for People with Disabilities.

The symposium was organized under the auspices of the Rector of Lodz University of Technology, prof. Krzysztof Jóźwik, and the President of the City of Łódź, Hanna Zdanowska.