Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Apr 15, 2023
Date Accepted: Aug 28, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Effectiveness of Social Virtual-Reality on Enhancing Social Interaction Skills in Children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Protocol for a Three-Arm Pilot Randomised Controlled Trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood. Children with ADHD have challenges in understanding social cues and behaviour problems while entering a social setting. Virtual reality (VR) has been applied to improve cognitive behaviours in children with ADHD. Previous studies have not utilised VR to improve social interaction competence and appropriateness in children with ADHD. The real-life scenarios created by VR offer a more effective alternative to therapeutic strategies for children with ADHD.
Objective:
To examine the feasibility and effectiveness of social VR training in enhancing social interaction skills compared to traditional social skills training in children with ADHD.
Methods:
In this non-blind, 3-arm randomised controlled trial, 90 participants with ADHD recruited from the community will be randomly assigned to the social VR intervention group, traditional social skill training group or waitlist control group in a 1:1:1 ratio. The child psychiatrist will conduct assessments for each participant at the beginning and at the end of each session. The Social Skills Rating Scale will be used to assess the social interaction skill of the participants in the pre-and post-intervention. Participants in the social VR intervention group and traditional social skills training group will receive twelve 20-minute training sessions for three weeks (four sessions per week). The participants in the waitlist control group will receive no training. The primary outcome measures are the child psychiatrist's assessment in each session and the Social Skills Rating Scale in the pre-and post-intervention. Other outcomes include the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function and Attention. Differences in the scale scores will be examined using t-test and f-test. Expected results: Subjects in the social VR intervention group will have better performance on social interaction skills compared to those in the traditional social skills training after 12 training sessions.
Results:
This protocol is approved by the Human Subjects Ethics Application Review Committee of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Application Number: HSEARS20221221003). The recruitment has started, and the data collected will commence in May.
Conclusions:
To our knowledge, this RCT is the first study examining the feasibility and effectiveness of Social VR-based intervention for enhancing the social interaction skills of children with ADHD in Hong Kong. This study can lead to a full-scale RCT. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05778526
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.