Immersive virtual reality eases pain for complex care patients
05/05/2025
Distraction therapy can be powerful. For patients experiencing chronic or acute pain, immersive virtual reality can be an escape from the present.
Lisa Sheehy, PhD and Investigator with Bruyère Health Research Institute, is exploring how this technology can be used to provide compassionate care. Her recent research examined the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality (VR) in two groups of patients receiving complex care at Bruyère Health.
Patients were asked to score their pain intensity and pain unpleasantness on a scale of 1 to 10. On average, patients using immersive VR while undergoing wound dressing changes scored their pain 3.6 points less than without the use of VR. They also reported a decrease in the unpleasantness of pain by an average of 5.6 points.
Patients with chronic pain reported an average decrease in pain intensity by 3.1, and a decrease in unpleasantness by 3.5.
“Patients receiving complex care can benefit from a little distraction,” Sheehy shared with Hospital News. “Many of the patient participants were in chronic pain and had been in hospital for a long time for complex conditions, so it’s thrilling to see clinically significant results, where many of our users expressed a substantial decrease in pain by using immersive VR.”
“It’s a wonderful thing the virtual reality,” one patient shared with the research team. “For a while the pain does subside... You don’t feel upset anymore, you’re not in pain, you’re completely in another world of your own.”
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This work was funded through a Compassion and AI Fellowship from AMS Healthcare.