Embodied Virtual Reality for Chronic Pain

Summary

Virtual reality creates interactive, multimodal sensory stimuli that have demonstrated considerable success in reducing pain. Much research so far has focused on VR's ability to shift patients' attention away from pain; however, these methods provide only transient relief through means of distraction and therefore do not offer long-term analgesic remediation. An alternative and promising approach is to utilize VR as an embodied simulation technique, where virtual body illusions are employed as tools to improve body perception and produce potentially more enduring analgesia.

Disturbances in body perception (i.e., alterations in the way the body is perceived) are increasingly acknowledged as a pertinent feature of chronic pain, and include aberrations in perceived shape, size, or color that differ from objective assessment. The degree of body perception distortion positively correlates with pain, and prior interventions have evinced that treatments aimed at reducing body perception distortions correspondingly ameliorate pain. Several recent experimental research studies have demonstrated the analgesic efficacy of body illusions in a range of pain conditions.

Immersive VR multisensory feedback training signifies a promising new avenue for the potential treatment of chronic pain by supporting the design of targeted virtual environments to alter (distorted) body perceptions. Various illusions have been described to alter pain perception; however, they. Have not been directly compared to each other. The multimodal stimulus control of VR enables physical-to-virtual body transfer illusions, resulting in the feeling that the virtual body is one's own. These virtual body illusions can modulate body perception with ease and could therefore be used to alter the perceived properties of pain, consequently utilizing a virtual avatar to specifically shape interactive processing between central and peripheral mechanisms.

Conditions

• Complex Regional Pain Syndromes
• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type I of the Upper Limb
• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome I (CRPS I)
• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome I of Upper Limb
• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome Type II
• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome II of Upper Limb
• Peripheral Nerve Injury Upper Limb
• Osteoarthritis Hand
• Osteoarthritis Finger

Interventions

DEVICE

Embodied virtual reality

An immersive headmounted display visually depicts a relaxing woods scene, coupled with a virtual avatar that either shows bodily illusions or no bodily illusions

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Balgrist University Hospital

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Zurich

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

NON_RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

80 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-05-31

Primary Completion

2024-08-31

Completion

2024-08-31

Countries

• Switzerland

Study Locations