JMIR Publications

Background:

Traditional pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) for patients has experienced challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic due to a lack of services and in-person appointments. Subsequent challenges like extensive wait times and ineffective remote care continues to pose an issue for the healthcare industry. Furthermore, despite the proven effectiveness of PR in addressing Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD) symptoms, PR completion rates remain low. As a result, a need developed for alternative and innovative methods of rehabilitation using remotely supervised virtual reality (VR)-based PR services for patients. Despite such a need, research on the effectiveness and acceptability of VR in PR remains limited. Therefore, this study explores the use of such a VR application.

Objective:

This study aims to investigate COPD patients’ perception and acceptability when using VR for pulmonary rehabilitation purposes.

Methods:

A VR pulmonary rehabilitation (PR in VR) intervention was used. This study employed an eight-week patient trial using the innovative VR rehabilitation programme. After the trial, 56 COPD patients (graded MRC three, four or five) at selected healthcare centres and hospitals in Staffordshire (United Kingdom) participated in the structured qualitative interview in which participants explored their experience and thoughts regarding the PR in VR intervention.

Results:

Using thematic analysis for the qualitative data, four themes and ten sub-themes emerged specific to patients’ perception and acceptability of VR for rehabilitation. These themes include physical and mental health outcomes (physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, symptomology), system usability (satisfaction, perceived ease of use), perception and experiences (acceptability, individual ability, relaxing and realistic virtual environments) and future intentions (recommendations and continued use).

Conclusions:

The findings highlight the importance of user-friendly VR experiences in medical settings, enhancing patient wellbeing, satisfaction, and engagement. By creating realistic and accessible virtual environments, our qualitative study has shown some promising evidence that patients perceived VR to support their subjective health outcomes. In addition, this study encouraged the desire to continuously use it as well as the positive opinions of recommending it to fellow patients. Patients who tested the VR application in this study showed a strong willingness to engage with the PRinVR intervention.

Clinicaltrial: