Virtual reality by mobile smartphone: improving child pedestrian safety

Abstract

Background Pedestrian injuries are a leading cause of paediatric injury. Effective, practical and cost-efficient behavioural interventions to teach young children street crossing skills are needed. They must be empirically supported and theoretically based. Virtual reality (VR) offers promise to fill this need and teach child pedestrian safety skills for several reasons, including: (A) repeated unsupervised practice without risk of injury, (B) automated feedback on crossing success or failure, (C) tailoring to child skill levels: (D) appealing and fun training environment, and (E) most recently given technological advances, potential for broad dissemination using mobile smartphone technology. Objectives and methods Extending previous work, we will evaluate delivery of an immersive pedestrian VR using mobile smartphones and the Google Cardboard platform, technology enabling standard smartphones to function as immersive VR delivery systems. We will overcome limitations of previous research suggesting children learnt some pedestrian skills after six VR training sessions but did not master adult-level pedestrian skills by implementing a randomised non-inferiority trial with two equal-sized groups of children ages 7–8 years (total N=498). All children will complete baseline, postintervention and 6-month follow-up assessments of pedestrian safety and up to 25 30-min pedestrian safety training trials until they reach adult levels of functioning. Half the children will be randomly assigned to train in Google Cardboard and the other half in a semi-immersive kiosk VR. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) models will assess primary outcomes. Discussion If results are as hypothesised, mobile smartphones offer substantial potential to overcome barriers of dissemination and implementation and deliver pedestrian safety training to children worldwide.

Is individual practice in an immersive and interactive virtual reality application non-inferior to practicing with traditional equipment in learning systematic clinical observation? A randomized controlled trial

“…The study confirmed the a priori assumption that VR would give a non-inferior learning outcome due to VR having some disadvantages compared to practicing in real life. Only a few earlier randomized controlled trials with a non-inferior assumption was found [33][34][35], and they got a similar result as the current study. Other randomized controlled trials without a non-inferior assumption have found the use of VR to give similar learning outcome as the comparison intervention [16,36,37].…”

“…The main features of the VirSam ABCDE application are immersion and interactivity, which have been found important for creating engagement and satisfaction in VR [19,39]. Most studies on the effect of VR evaluated in clinical-and healthcare reviews and meta-analyses have used either fully immersive [33,34] or interactive [36] solutions. Thus, there are few studies on the effect of applications that are both immersive and interactive.…”

Virtual Reality for Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury Rehabilitation: A Systematic Review

“…Commercial TV-based VR systems are also more cost-effective than developing custom VR training systems. However, adopting more advanced VR systems is an increasing trend in both medical research (eg, stroke rehabilitation 25 procedural pain management 26 ) and other fields of scientific research (eg, distracted driving 27 and pedestrian safety 28,29 ). Immersive VR systems, combined with custom-designed software specifically for children with TBI, could provide children with a highly engaging, individualized, and realistic intervention system, which may ultimately enhance the transfer of skills children learned in a virtual system to real life activities post-intervention.…”

Pediatric Health Care Provider Perspectives on Injury Prevention Counseling in Acute and Primary Care Settings

“…Faced with these challenges, health care providers have started to explore and study new technologies and workflows for counseling, such as smartphones, 20-23 computer kiosks, 24-26 and screening tools. 27-29 Clinician views toward novel injury prevention education tools are currently unknown, and perceptions of trainees, a generally younger population more attuned to technology, toward new approaches of injury prevention knowledge acquisition is poorly characterized.…”