Virtual Painkillers: Designing Accessible Virtual Reality Experiences for Helping Cancer Patients Manage Pain at Home

More than half of cancer patients are dealing with moderately severe pain on a monthly basis and most of them report a breakthrough pain experience at least once. Despite the importance of pain management for cancer patients, cancer pain remains undertreated. With computer technology and especially Virtual Reality offering open endless opportunities for pain management, we must consider how low-cost home-based Virtual Reality for cancer patients can be sensitively designed to provide comfortable, enriching pain management experiences. Working closely with 51 cancer patients, medical and paramedical personnel, we co-designed an intelligent personalized mobile application to first collect ecologically momentary assessment data on symptoms like pain and fatigue and Health-Related Quality of Life and subsequently enhance symptom management of cancer patients at home. Through this paper, we thoroughly explain the screening process and quantitative analysis we run to identify which environments patients would like to receive as a Virtual Reality intervention that can facilitate the design of Virtual Reality interventions for cancer patients.