Designing Virtual Reality to Alleviate Pain

This article presents content originally published in DesignMind, a design journal operated by frog. It is delivered through translation by Transmedia Digital Inc. under the supervision of Mr. Noriaki Okada of DentsuCDCExperience Design Department.

 

frog's innovation through design extends into the fields of healthcare and wellness, becoming a significant area within frog's design practice. The VR game for burn patients released in 2016 successfully alleviated the physical and mental distress of patients undergoing treatment. It would not be an exaggeration to say it presented a benchmark for solutions in medical settings. Recalling Agnes Purtila's words, "Value is created by exceeding standards" (Part 2 of the series), let's examine the concept behind this game development.

Focusing on Challenges in Burn Treatment

Imagine suffering a severe burn. The pain is unlike anything you've ever experienced. In agony during what feels like the worst moment of your life, you rush to the hospital seeking relief, only to find it marks the beginning of a long ordeal.

After initial treatment, you must visit a burn center for weeks or months of ongoing care. Especially in the early stages, this treatment is nearly as painful as the burn itself. Gauze is removed from the wound, the area is cleaned, ointment is applied, and the bandage is replaced. This procedure can take up to two hours and must be done daily, sometimes twice a day, to protect the scorched skin from infection. Furthermore, surgery may be necessary. The pain is relentless, and while recovery is gradual, it leaves emotional scars.

The severe damage caused by burns, coupled with the frequent wound care and bandage changes over the following days, weeks, or even months, represents one of the most excruciating pains a patient can endure. Opioid analgesics are the mainstay of pain management, but they are known for their short- and long-term side effects. Furthermore, despite such medication, burn patients' pain is often not adequately relieved.

Best Practices for Developing Low-Cost VR for Burn Patients

Distracting patients is recognized as an effective alternative to medication for pain management. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the immersive environment of VR is an extremely effective method for distracting burn patients undergoing treatment. However, VR has not become widespread in clinical practice beyond research settings. This is largely because many such systems are custom-made and expensive. New systems like Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift have made VR more accessible, but even these can be too expensive for clinical settings, especially when multiple devices per patient are needed to reduce infection control concerns.

Amid this, Google Cardboard has opened the possibility of creating VR systems suitable for medical use by combining inexpensive cardboard boxes and lenses with smartphones, which are now widely accessible to most people. However, current Google Cardboard headsets are not designed for the humid environment of burn treatment settings. Furthermore, most existing games are designed assuming the user is standing and can move freely forward, backward, up, down, left, and right, making them unsuitable for burn treatment patients.

frog viewed this as a design challenge: to understand the opportunities and constraints of burn therapy and design an affordable headset and VR game experience suited to these conditions. Working with Dr. Brian Priggin, a Fellow in frog's Medical Design practice and a resident in Stanford Plastic Surgery, a multidisciplinary team tackled this challenge.

The outcome of this passionate project will be a concept for an extremely accessible, easy-to-assemble, low-cost headset suitable for use in burn treatment settings. Alongside the headset, we are developing an open-source game concept called "Ēpiónē" for burn patients. We hope this concept will serve as a platform or template for other developers creating VR experiences for patients. In this game, patients can immerse themselves in a VR environment that distracts them from pain while maintaining the proper position for burn treatment.

While working on this concept, the project team created a list of design principles detailed below. These principles emerged throughout the design and development of both hardware and software, taking into account design constraints identified through field research, interviews with nurses and patients, and user testing. While these principles are considered generally applicable to VR use in healthcare, they were created specifically with burn patients in mind. In the spirit of making medical solutions as widely accessible as possible, we are publishing these principles for the benefit of all those involved in designing and creating solutions in this field.

Design Principles for Medical VR Production: For Solutions in the Healthcare Field

Headset
Several design constraints necessitated pursuing a custom VR headset solution. It needed to be extremely affordable, constructed from durable and waterproof materials, and comfortable for patients. Ideally, it should be designed for easy assembly from flat-packed components to enable efficient shipping. The specific principles guiding the headset design are as follows.
The rest of this article can be found in the web magazine "AXIS".

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