Previously submitted to: JMIR Serious Games (no longer under consideration since Mar 18, 2026)
Date Submitted: Jan 4, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 10, 2024 - Mar 6, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Service Evaluation of Pulmonary Rehabilitation in Virtual Reality for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
ABSTRACT
Background:
The traditional pulmonary rehabilitation service for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) patients has been challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Therefore, there is a need for alternative and innovative methods of pulmonary rehabilitation using remotely supervised VR-based PR services to patients.
Objective:
This study aims to investigate COPD patients’ acceptability to use VR to self-manage their condition.
Methods:
Eight-week patient trial using an innovative VR pulmonary rehabilitation programme. A total of 56 COPD patients graded MRC four or five registered at patients, selected healthcare centres and hospitals in Staffordshire, UK participated in the qualitative interview.
Results:
Using thematic analysis for the qualitative data, four themes and ten sub-themes emerged specific to delivering pulmonary rehabilitation using VR.
Conclusions:
Overall, this study demonstrates how remotely supervised VR-based pulmonary rehabilitation could help to overcome current issues and limitations associated with providing this service to COPD patients at scale.
Citation
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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.