Document Type
Journal Article
Journal Article Version
Final Version / Publisher's PDF (peer-reviewed)
Publication Date
8-1-2025
Abstract
As awareness of mental health issues rises, the demand for accessible and effective therapy becomes more urgent. However, existing digital therapy platforms fall short of providing personalization and real-time interaction, often leading to generic and ineffective responses that fail to meet individual psychological needs. These platforms rely on costly therapists or inadequately trained assistants, which limits their effectiveness. Additionally, the centralized systems used to manage therapy sessions lack adequate traceability, trust, and security, which are critical for users' confidence in the process. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based solution integrated with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) to deliver superior Metaverse-based therapy sessions that are decentralized, traceable, trustworthy, secure, and access-controlled. We fine-tune a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT)-3.5 model to provide personalized and context-aware responses in real time, enhancing user experience and engagement. The proposed system achieves a ROUGE-1 score of 0.5147 and a ROUGE-L score of 0.4048, demonstrating its effectiveness in generating relevant responses. A cost analysis reveals that user access control operations incur the highest gas costs, while simpler operations remain costefficient. Compared to existing digital mental health platforms, our system offers superior access control, automation, security, and user interaction through the integration of blockchain, NFTs, and decentralized storage. These features, combined with GenAI for real-time interaction, have the potential to significantly improve user experience and engagement in Metaverse-based therapy sessions
Published in
Computers in Human Behavior Reports
Keywords
Blockchain, GenAI, LLM, Metaverse, Therapy sessions, Virtual healthcare
Copyright Notice
© 2025 D. Hawashin, K. Salah, R. Jayaraman, et al., reuse allowed according to Creative Commons license.
License for Reuse
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Hawashin, D., Salah, K., Jayaraman, R., Ellaham, S., & Yaqoob, I. (2025). Using GenAI and Blockchain for Enhanced User Experience in Metaverse-Based Therapy Sessions. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 5, 100754. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2025.100754