Virtual Reality in Chronic Kidney Disease Education and Training

Abstract

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) often struggle to understand their disease and its treatment options. The learning content they receive does not provide the experience necessary to truly understand their disease and its treatment options. Nephrology care providers struggle to convey their knowledge effectively to patients, which leads to dissatisfaction. By applying learning science (the marriage of psychology and the neuroscience of learning), digital technologies like virtual reality can address these shortcomings by providing the experiential learning necessary for a deeper understanding. We show that virtual reality broadly engages multiple learning centers in the brain, thus spreading the wealth of knowledge while reducing cognitive load. We conclude by showing how virtual reality technology could be incorporated into existing CKD education and training workflows.