Compulsion to write. VR for children’s pain management – thesis.
On January 19th I submitted my thesis! It was a milestone in my university journey and brought an incredible feeling of satisfaction. Working on that project was extremely time and energy-consuming, hence the lack of my presence here. After hours, and days of reading, mind-mapping, writing, and repeating these steps over and over again, the last thing I wanted to do was more writing. However, since it has been three weeks since I submitted my work, I felt that I am ready to write about it. Moreover, I am being anxious about my other project and feel like I should be doing a million things at the same time. Yet, I do not want to write about it right now.
It is nearly 6 o’clock on a Tuesday morning and I am sitting in an almost completely dark room with a laptop on my knees and typing these words on a keyboard, with this strong compulsion to write.
I wrote my thesis on the topic of VR being used as a non-pharmacological pain management tool for paediatric patients. The inspiration and my interest in that field arose when I was pregnant during the first year of my degree in VR and explored how this cutting-edge technology can be implemented during labour. From there, my curiosity led me to investigate how VR can be used to improve the well-being of young patients. It was and still is fascinating to me that VR can influence a quality of life in such as simple way and be implemented in many fields way beyond the entertainment industry.
The focus of my paper was not a typical approach to the studied subject. Based on the existing research, I knew that VR works as a pain and anxiety-reducing tool for children and young patients, and there are plans to study more and implement VR across big paediatric medical settings (especially in the USA).
The positive reactions to VR from the patients, their families, medical staff, and other professionals along with the data analysis prove that VR has huge potential to improve children’s well-being during painful medical procedures.
Implementing VR can also lead to reducing the number of pharmacological substances young patients have to take to ease the pain. VR influences the patient’s perception without numbing the whole body through medications.
The benefits of VR being used for children’s pain are greatly highlighted and companies such as Applied VR deliver their solutions including VR HMDs, headphones and software with ready-to-play VR games and experiences to the medical settings testing VR as a safe alternative to medications for children pain controlling.
In light of the above, it is surprising that there is only a little evidence of the characteristics of the applications offered in VR to children. And that aspect was the main concern of my thesis. After acknowledging VR as a successful tool in pain management for children, I wanted to analyse the applications offered to young patients, to understand their mechanics, approach to a patient, and overall success. It came out that the previous research in the field was concentrated on checking if/proving that VR can be a pain management tool, without paying enough attention to the VR worlds offered to children.
At the end of my written work, I recommended setting up a standardized list of information on VR apps trialled and including them in the research documentation. This should be a mandatory element that would allow learning from the conducted research and understanding more about what kind of VR experiences children were exposed to. I believe that among the essential information should be: age suitability, the length of the game, the objective of the game, its aesthetics and genre. These are some of the features that in my opinion will add value to the research outcome and help professionals, researchers, VR creators and enthusiasts with their future work.
The thesis I have written and the outcome of the research are especially important, as the project I am about to build was inspired by VR for children’s pain management and I am hoping it will have the potential to be used for that purpose.