Offering Outworld Experiences to In-Patients With Dementia Through Virtual Reality: Mixed Methods Study

Abstract

Abstract Background Research has suggested that institutionalization can increase the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. To date, recent studies have reported a growing number of successful deployments of virtual reality for people with dementia to alleviate behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia and improve quality of life. However, virtual reality has yet to be rigorously evaluated, since the findings are still in their infancy, with nonstatistically significant and inconclusive results. Objective Unlike prior works, to overcome limitations in the current literature, our virtual reality system was co-designed with people with dementia and experts in dementia care and was evaluated with a larger population of patients with mild to severe cases of dementia. Methods Working with 44 patients with dementia and 51 medical experts, we co-designed a virtual reality system to enhance the symptom management of in-patients with dementia residing in long-term care. We evaluated the system with 16 medical experts and 20 people with dementia. Results This paper explains the screening process and analysis we used to identify which environments patients would like to receive as an intervention. We also present the system’s evaluation results by discussing their impact in depth. According to our findings, virtual reality contributes significantly to the reduction of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia, especially for aggressive, agitated, anxious, apathetic, depressive, and fearful behaviors. Conclusions Ultimately, we hope that the results from this study will offer insight into how virtual reality technology can be designed, deployed, and used in dementia care.