ChronicVR

This was my research project for my Master's degree in Computer Science. I made a VR game with Unity and tested it with chronic pain patients at Wellington Regional Hospital.

Game Design + Development

The design of ChronicVR was created with consultation from Wellington Regional Hospital's Pain Management Services. The Pain Management Service advised on what chronic pain patients were capable of, what would be beneficial for the patients, and what kinds of environment patients would enjoy. Around 6 members of staff from the Pain Management Services were consulted. Their roles consisted of psychologists, therapists, physiotherapists, and nurses.

Within ChronicVR there are three categories of gameplay, each focusing on one type of distraction: physically active distraction, mentally active distraction, and passive observation. ChronicVR is designed to isolate each category as much as possible so that the categories can be studied. Inside ChronicVR, the player plays the role of a magician, using a magic wand (handheld controller) to cast various magic to interact with the world. Players solve puzzles with these interactions and progress through the game.

Development was done in Unity for HTC Vive headsets.

User Study

Following the development of the game, I tested the game with chronic pain patients at Wellington Region Hospital to understand the effectiveness of ChronicVR to support people with chronic pain.

The user study consisted of evaluating ChronicVR with fourteen chronic pain patients. Participants played all three levels of ChronicVR as well as a non-VR control task in a randomised order. Each session lasted 10 minutes, with a 5-minute break in between. Participants were asked to rate their pain at the start, middle, and end of each task. These pain ratings form the primary results of this study.

The user study was approved by the Ministry of Health's Health and Disability Ethics Committees and Maori Partnership Board's Research Advisory Group Maori (RAG-M).

Publications

The results of this research were presented at two conferences, as well as in my Master's thesis.

Wang, J., Anslow, C., Mccallum, S. J. R., Robinson, B., Medeiros, D., & Jorge, J. (2022, November). VR Games for Chronic Pain Management. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (pp. 1-11). https://doi.org/10.1145/3562939.3565624

Wang, J. (2021). Virtual Reality Based Passive and Active Distraction Methods for the Treatment of Chronic Pain (Version 1). Open Access Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. https://doi.org/10.26686/wgtn.14128943.v1

Wang, J., Anslow, C., Robinson, B., & McCallum, S. (2019, November). Extended reality for chronic pain relief. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (pp. 1-2). https://doi.org/10.1145/3359996.3365030

External Links

Research Group Page https://ecs.wgtn.ac.nz/Groups/HCI/VRforChronicPain

VRST 2022 Trailer https://youtu.be/pqGnRfqwfk0

VRST 2022 Presentation https://youtu.be/ZWjkl7hXv1w