Currently submitted to: JMIR XR and Spatial Computing (JMXR)
Date Submitted: Jun 24, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 30, 2026 - Aug 25, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Impact of a Virtual Reality Experience of Home Medical Care on Medical Students’ Attitudes: Effects of an Educational Intervention Using Real Home Visit Footage
ABSTRACT
Background:
Medical students lack home care exposure. While Virtual Reality (VR) suits skill training, its impact on value-oriented domains like home care remains under-explored. This study evaluated VR's effect on first-year students' attitudes, career interest, and motivation.
Methods:
A pre-post intervention study was conducted with 110 first-year medical students in Japan. Participants viewed immersive VR footage of an actual home visit, including travel, clinical consultation, and the patient’s living environment. Attitudes were measured using a 14-item validated scale (covering general attitudes, practice, treatment, and reimbursement), alongside career interest and learning motivation. Data were analyzed using paired t-tests, and exploratory two-way mixed ANOVA was used to examine differences by prior healthcare experience.
Results:
Total attitude scores increased significantly from 57.1 to 64.4 (p < 0.001). Significant improvements were observed in subscales for “Home Care Practice”, “Treatment”, and “Time and Reimbursement” (p < 0.001), though general attitudes remained stable. Both career interest and learning motivation also showed significant gains (p < 0.001). Students with prior caregiving experience had higher baseline attitudes, but improvements were observed regardless of prior experience. Baseline motivation showed limited association with subsequent attitude change.
Conclusions:
By fostering "embodied" understanding, VR-based home care education was associated with short-term improvements in first-year medical students’ attitudes, career interest, and learning motivation. Immersive 360-degree VR may serve as a safe, realistic, and feasible introductory tool for helping novice learners appreciate patients’ living environments before direct home visit experience.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.