philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

11Dec/19Off

PhD candidate has patients barking up the wrong tree with virtual reality

d880x320He sent 20 patients into the woods for this – a virtual wood that is. He used virtual reality to create a wood populated with gazelles, camels and giraffes with a trail for the patients to follow. Whereas they were really walking on a treadmill, the VR headset had them venturing into the wild.

Sneaky stretch

The patients were told to walk as far as they could until the pain in their legs became too intense. The research showed that virtual woods didn’t magically have them walking further than they did on a plain treadmill. What did help, however, was to give the virtual woods a sneaky stretch. Then the patients suddenly walked further.

‘After the first walk in the woods, we placed a flag to mark the spot where the previous session had ended,’ says Cuperus. ‘In the meantime, I gave the woods a bit of a stretch, which meant that, without noticing it, you had to walk further to reach the same flag. None of the 20 test subjects noticed this manipulation, and they walked significantly further than in the first walk.’ Cuperus is thus playing with the placebo effect, which is also one of the research fields of his supervisor Andrea Evers, who was awarded the famous Stevin Prize this year for her research into this effect.

See the full story here: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2019/12/phd-candidate-has-patients-barking-up-the-wrong-tree-with-virtual-reality

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