Problem: Those suffering from chronic pain are unseen: their experience seems both invisible and incommunicable. This makes it difficult for healthcare professionals, family, friends and co-workers to believe and understand a patient’s suffering, and may negatively affect those who might otherwise want to empathize with and support patients. 

Social stigma 

Not feeling believed and understood can lead patients to confusion, frustration, anger, anxiety, shame and social isolation. Further, gaining an empathetic understanding of a patients’ experience is not an adjunct, but is integral to helping patients to move forward alongside their pain. Therefore, we designed an interactive system called “AS-IF” to help educate the public, raise awareness and enable others to gain a sense of empathy (or perspective-taking in the short run) with patients. 

VR Design. This interactive VR system helps people who don’t live with chronic pain (“the public”) gain a sense of empathy with chronic pain patients by putting them in the shoes — or virtual body (avatar) —of a patient.

VR users co-inhabit a 3D avatar of a patient; “pain” is indicated by red glowing particles that also signal functional limitations. A user simultaneously hears her self-talk — the patient’s fears, struggles and concerns. In these ways, users gain a sense of what it may feel like to try to do everyday tasks with physical impairments and the all-too-common social stigma they face.       

VR Tech. The revised system was developed in Unity3D using an Oculus HMD and Microsoft Kinect Sensor as an input device that detects and tracks the user’s position and movements.