A Method to Improve the Design of Virtual Reality Games in Healthcare Applied to Increase Physical Activity in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increase in research related to specific applications or features of virtual reality tools for health care. Each work highlights their findings related to the specific case on which the research was focusing. The present study is a proposal of a design method for virtual reality games for healthcare applications. Virtual reality allows the integration of real physical activity, required for health treatments, and a virtual world that improves the engagement of the patient. The design method is based on the needs that a health treatment faces in terms of motivational activities and challenges to include in a virtual reality scenario, obtained from the investigation of previous works. A treatment benefiting from user exercise was selected as the case to fully describe the design method. Therefore, this paper also describes a virtual reality tool developed to help in the treatment of chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. The tool was used by a group of patients. To evaluate the method and the virtual reality application, two types of tests were applied: a clinical test adapted from previous literature and a usability test focused on the virtual environment. Clinical tests showed low stress and good physical health, while usability tests showed engagement.