Reducing stress and anxiety in cancer patients with the use of virtual reality.

Abstract

303 Background: Applications of virtual reality (VR) have impacted every sphere of civilization, from speculative architecture to the practice of medicine. Building on the body of research already showing the benefits of immersive VR experiences, the goal of our study was to determine whether the stress and anxiety experience of different types of cancer could be mitigated by using virtual reality, specifically through relaxing VR experiences. Methods: A comparative observational study was conducted at community outpatient offices for patients who wanted to improve patient experience throughout their cancer treatment. Patients who had symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and vision issues were excluded from the study. The VR intervention consisted of patients watching a relaxation VR 360 video on the YouTube app every day for one week on the Google Cardboard VR headset. Pre- and post VR intervention scores were recorded using a DASS21 questionnaire. The mean differences in scores as well as t-tests were compared between individuals to see if VR improved patient’s experience through one’s cancer treatment. Results: There were 115 subjects ( n = 115). There was an average reduction score of 6.50 points with stress seeing the biggest drop in score of 2.71 points. Breast cancer was the most common cancer diagnosis. Metastatic cancer was the cancer with the biggest change in VR intervention with an average decrease of 12.83 points. Conclusions: Virtual reality (VR) has been proven to significantly reduce the psychological discomfort, including stress, anxiety, and depression experienced during treatment, in the context of caring for cancer patients. The empirical results strongly imply that VR is an effective therapeutic intervention modality in the inpatient setting, with compelling implications for the use of VR technology in the future to lessen the physical and psychological suffering of cancer patients.[Table: see text]