Assessing the usability of an immersive virtual reality grocery store in healthy controls.

BACKGROUND: Immersive virtual reality (IVR) as a research platform to study human behaviors is an emerging field and may be useful for studying self-care management, especially in the gap between formal healthcare recommendations and day-to-day living. Self-care activities, such as grocery shopping, can be challenging for people with chronic illness. We developed an IVR environment that simulates a real-life grocery store and conducted a usability study to demonstrate the safety and acceptability of IVR as an experimental environment. METHODS: This study was a three-arm randomized control trial involving 24 participants, conducted as a usability study to evaluate aspects of the experimental condition including the effectiveness of a training exposure, the occurrence of undesirable effects associated with IVR, and participants' experiences of realism, immersion, and spatial presence. The experiment, using a head mounted device and handheld controllers, included a 10-minute training exposure, followed by one of three unique 30-minute experimental conditions which exposed participants to different combinations of tasks and stimuli, and a post-experience interview. We measured controller errors, undesirable symptoms associated with IVR, and the perception of realism, immersion, and spatial presence. RESULTS: Participants used controllers effectively to interact within the IVR environment. Hand controller use errors were fewer during the experimental conditions compared to the training exposure. Minimal undesirable IVR symptoms were reported. Presence was rated in the middle range with no significant differences based on experimental condition. Overall, user experience feedback was positive. CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrated that participants could engage in our IVR environment without excessive error or experiencing undesirable effects and confirmed that the virtual experience attained a level of presence necessary to effectively engage in the study. These findings give us confidence that this IVR intervention designed to explore instrumental activities of daily living is safe, effective and provides a credible, controlled simulated community-like setting.

Designing Immersive Virtual Reality Environments for Supporting Patients at Home: Translating Input From Home Care Nurse Experts to Design Requirements.

Immersive virtual reality computer programs provide new experimental and treatment interventions that hold great promise for nursing. Immersive virtual reality uses sensory cues to represent real-world environments in a way that makes participants feel as if they are in a physical space different from the one in which they currently exist. As the acceptance of immersive virtual reality as a clinical and experimental tool has grown, so has the need to ensure that the context depicted in the environment mirrors both the sensory and the task requirements of the real-world situation. Here, we describe the use of nurse expert key informant group interviews to generate requirements that must be fulfilled in immersive virtual reality environments designed to evoke and engage participants in self-management tasks. An expert panel of four home care nurses participated in three sessions designed to elicit details of common home care challenges, frequency of variation, and typical participants. More than 20 potential scenarios were identified. The design team later used this information to create design requirements for two key scenarios and subsequently develop immersive virtual reality environments for use in research studies, mapping sensory and functional expectations to immersive virtual reality implementations. Challenges in mapping from key informant group findings to requirements are addressed.