IU startup uses VR to help kids with ADHD, send message to students
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Zeb Wood is an entrepreneur, but also an evangelist of sorts for extended reality (XR), a catch-all term for 3D animation, virtual reality and augmented reality. The high-tech space is booming, and not just in Hollywood (as his college students assume), but also in health care, manufacturing, and even the sports sector—three meaty industries in Indiana.
His “pulpit” is his classroom, where he convinces students to pursue rewarding XR careers in the Hoosier state—and Wood is practicing what he preaches. His startup, Open Mind XR, recently won a pitch competition for a technology that helps children with ADHD.
With roughly 8 million American children with ADHD or ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), and only 10,000 psychiatrists in the U.S., Wood says there’s a major gap in care.
“There’s far too few psychiatrists to connect to those children,” says Wood, a lecturer at the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering in Indianapolis. “[Open Mind XR] is trying to create more access to help parents identify if their children might be having these challenges, and the ultimate goal is to allow them to assess their weaknesses and strengths at home…rather than waiting months to meet a doctor.”
Collaborating with Hoosier neuropsychiatrist Dr. Tom Hummer, the startup has created a suite of virtual reality (VR) programs that are designed to be direct to consumer, rather than for clinical use. One focus of the technology is emotion recognition.
“In VR, we put [the children] in an environment, let’s say a cafeteria. We can make it look very realistic and have lots of noises, so it’s harder to focus on the person giving the emotions,” says Wood. “You can think of that like a quick test; at the end, the child and parents can see a score on whether the child was focused, scored poorly on certain emotions, or both.”
Nearly 40 children in central Indiana—with the goal of 100—are now testing the VR technology as part of a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. An earlier NIH study involved another 50 Hoosier children testing a set of modules that focus on empathy and social perspective-taking. In late 2023, Open Mind XR won the IU Idea to Startup Pitch Competition, and the young company is currently part of an NIH bootcamp that connects it to medical product experts throughout the U.S.
In addition to emotion recognition, Wood says the VR technology also addresses empathy and social perspective-taking.
“My students helped build [the technologies], and that’s the big thing for me,” says Wood. “We’re hiring our students to help support the research to build these VR environments and translate their 3D skills toward health care, manufacturing and the sports sectors—which are much more well-known than entertainment in Indiana.”
Wood says 100% of the students he teaches initially plan to leave Indiana, but projects like this one help convince about 80% of them to remain in the Hoosier state after graduation, where “you can have a very fulfilling career and still make games or films on the side.”
The bigger challenge, he says, is helping Hoosier employers understand how XR can benefit their enterprises—and championing that message is a core mission of his career.
“Usually, that point is best illustrated in the form of training employees, like someone on the manufacturing floor at Cummins, Roche, or Eli Lilly; that [line of work] can be dangerous. The training is typically reading a book or watching a video, but using extended reality, we can put a 3-dimensional manufacturing floor in front of the new employee, and they can test the processes they’ll be doing 100% safely,” says Wood. “They can repeat it as many times as they want, and you’re not shutting down the manufacturing floor to train new people, and they can train at home too.”
With a national presence in the manufacturing, biomedical/healthcare and sports sectors—all attractive applications for XR—Indiana could gain prominence in the space, says Wood.
“There are no leaders nationally in the XR space,” says Wood. “Not only can our Indiana companies benefit, but Indiana can lead in the next evolution of what it means to do work in these sectors with XR and the technologies that surround it.”
Wood says he’ll continue to preach the power of XR and its mutual benefits for Indiana’s private sector and talent development pipeline.
“What I hate to see is somebody who has these incredible skills not be able to utilize them or utilize their passions, so I’ve been able to trick a lot of our amazing students to stay in Indiana,” laughs Wood. “I want to create more opportunities for our students to do what they love, and ultimately, help as many people as possible.”
In 2015, Wood also led a project that 3D sculpted aesthetic prosthetics for people who had lost portions of their face due to injury or disease.