Virtual Nature as a Health-promoting Intervention for Nursing Home Residents With Dementia

Summary

Rationale and Objectives:

Despite significant efforts from healthcare professionals, nursing home residents with dementia often face isolation and a reduced quality of life. Increasing attention has been given to digital solutions as a complement to pharmaceutical treatments. In particular, Virtual Nature (VN; i.e., virtual reality simulations that simulate nature experiences) has emerged as a promising, cost-effective approach to enhancing quality of life and slowing cognitive decline in nursing home residents with dementia. This project aims to assess the long-term effects of a VN intervention on various health and well-being indicators in nursing home residents with dementia.

Design:

The study will be conducted as a randomized controlled trial with parallel conditions. Participants will be randomly assigned to either a treatment or a control group. The treatment group will undergo a 12-week VN intervention in addition to usual medications and nursing home activities, while the control group will continue with their usual medications and activities. Assessments will be performed at baseline, in concomitance with the first VN session, and at 4 and 12 weeks into the intervention.

VN intervention:

The intervention will consist of undergoing a 10-minute VN session twice a week for 12 consecutive weeks. The participants will choose a 360° video from a library of different VN scenarios. The 360° videos within the library will be filmed by the researchers in locations near or in the same region of the participant's nursing homes, and will consist of scenes from various seasons in Norway (spring, summer, fall, winter) and depict popular outdoor recreations such as hiking and cross-country skiing. The VN sessions will be delivered in the participants' room. The playback will be done through a Meta Quest 3 (Reality Labs

, USA). The intervention will be delivered by the researchers in collaboration with caregivers and/or nursing students in practice.

Participants:

Sixty nursing home residents with dementia will be recruited from different nursing homes in Drammen municipality and randomly assigned to the treatment or the control condition. The treatment group will undergo the VN intervention while continuing to receive their usual medications and attending regular activities at their respective nursing homes. The control group will only continue receiving their usual medication and attending regular activities at their respective nursing homes. Inclusion criteria are: being a nursing-home resident with a dementia diagnosis, having normal or corrected-to-normal sight and being able to communicate in Norwegian. Additionally, participants will be excluded if deemed to have poor tolerance to the VN experience (this will be evaluated based on preliminary trials and discussions with caregivers). Written informed consent will be collected for all participants (either directly from the participant or, in case they are not legally competent, their caregivers), after having explained the benefits and risks of participating to them.

Instruments:

Basic demographic data (age and gender) will be recorded. To assess potential long-term effects, the following measures will be collected at baseline, week 4, and week 12 for both the treatment and control groups: Quality of Life in Late-stage Dementia scale, Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia, Brief Agitation Rating Scale, Clinical Dementia Rating scale, and Use of psychotropic drugs.

Conditions

• Dementia
• Nursing Home Resident
• Virtual Reality
• Quality of Life
• Mental Health

Interventions

OTHER

Virtual Nature intervention (VN)

The intervention will consist of a 12-week virtual nature program in which participants will engage in two sessions per week. During each session, they will watch a 10-minute 360° video depicting a natural setting. Participants will select videos from a curated library of nature scenarios filmed by researchers in locations near or within the same region as their nursing homes. The videos will showcase various seasons in Norway (spring, summer, fall, and winter) and include popular activities such as hiking and cross-country skiing. The videos will be played using a Meta Quest 3 headset, with sessions conducted in participants' rooms by nursing home staff-except for the first session, which will be facilitated by the researchers.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of South-Eastern Norway

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Giovanna Calogiuri · University of South-Eastern Norway

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2025-09-08

Primary Completion

2026-12-31

Completion

2026-12-31

Countries

• Norway

Study Locations