JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Many studies evaluated how digital media might impact the emotional and perspective-taking dimensions of empathy in both clinical and non-clinical environments. However, few studies have focused on designing virtual reality (VR) to motivate empathy for chronic pain patients. Here, we designed a VR game titled AS IF.

Objective:

The goal of this game is to increase non-patients’ empathy towards the growing number of people who live with chronic pain. Further, we would like to evaluate the prototype and devise design suggestions to guide future research.

Methods:

We first introduce the design features of the VR game, AS IF, and then describe the study devised to evaluate its feasibility. A total of 18 participants were recruited and experienced the game.

Results:

Findings suggest that the game was effective in improving implicit and explicit empathy, as well as its emotional and perspective-taking aspects. More specifically, for the adapted Empathy Scale, the total scores in the pre-test and the post-test score did not reach any statistical significance (t(17)= -1.41, P = 0.076). However, we did find differences in the sub-scales. For the kindness subscale showed a statistically significant increase in the post-test than in the pre-test (t(17) = -3.97, P = 0.01). For the scores of the Willingness to Help Scale before and after the game intervention, from a t-test analysis, a significant increase in the post-test score was observed compared to the pretest score (t(17) = -4.51, P < 0.01). The effect size for this analysis was found to be a large effect (d= -1.063).

Conclusions:

The contributions are (1) AS IF is one of the pioneering VR games designed to motivate empathy specifically towards chronic pain patients, and (2) we proposed design suggestions to facilitate empathy and greater understanding towards chronic pain patients for future researchers.