Virtual Reality in Health System: Beyond Entertainment. A Mini‐Review on the Efficacy of VR During Cancer Treatment

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR), a computer-generated virtual environment, has been increasingly used in the entertainment world becoming a very new evolving field, but VR technology has also found a variety of applications in the biomedical field. VR can offer to subjects a safe environment within which to carry on different interventions ranging from the rehabilitation of discharged patients directly at home, to the support of hospitalized patients during different procedures and also of oncological inpatient subjects. VR appears as a promising tool for support and monitoring treatments in cancer patients influencing psychological and physiological functions. The aim of this systematic review is to provide an overview of all the studies that used VR intervention on cancer patients and analyze their main findings. Nineteen studies across nearly a thousand articles were identified that explored effects of VR interventions on cancer patients. Although these studies varied greatly in setting and design, this review identified some overarching themes. Results found that VR improved patients' emotional well-being, and diminished cancer-related psychological symptoms. The studies explored various relevant variables including different types of settings (i.e., during chemotherapy, during pain procedures, during hospitalization). Here, we point to the need of a global and multi-disciplinary approach aimed at analyzing the effects of VR taking advantage of the new technology systems like biosensors as well as electroencephalogram monitoring pre, during, and after intervention. Devoting more attention to bio-physiological variables, standardized procedures, extending duration to longitudinal studies and adjusting for motion sickness related to VR treatment need to become standard of this research field.

Home to Hospital Live Streaming With Virtual Reality Goggles: A Qualitative Study Exploring the Experiences of Hospitalized Children (Preprint)

“…The observations in this study may support the hypothesis that combining those two techniques in one device is valuable for hospitalized patients. Prior studies about videoconferencing and VR have noted similar effects as our study regarding feelings and thoughts of the users [7][8][9]12]. Patients felt more positive and felt more "normal" when they used videoconferencing [7,8].…”

“…Patients felt more positive and felt more "normal" when they used videoconferencing [7,8]. Next to that VR improved emotional state and positive emotions during hospitalization [12]. It is therefore likely that the combination of VR and videoconferencing, as the results of our study suggest, also causes positive feelings and improves the experience of hospitalization.…”

“…The virtual environment nowadays is mainly obtainable via a Smartphone placed in a head mounted display (HMD). The view to the real environment is cut off by the goggles and the patient is only able to look into the virtual world [11,12]. A considerable amount of literature has been published about the use of VR in reducing pain [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21].…”

“…Together these studies indicate that VR is an effective distracter and a promising non-pharmacological analgesic intervention. Most studies described the use of VR in outpatient settings instead of hospitalized patients [12,22,23]. However, the use of VR at a hospital ward seems feasible and without great side effects [22][23][24][25].…”

“…A recent systematic review about VR for medical inpatients found it to be efficacious, easy to use, safe and contributing to patient satisfactions [22]. Among oncologic patients, studies investigating VR during hospitalization reported improvement of emotional state and positive emotions [12].…”