VR for Cancer Pain & Palliative Care

Farmooo is a VR game for teenaged cancer patients (ages 14 to 18) who are in-hospital for chemotherapy treatments. In this virtual environment (VE), teens explore, grow edible plants and are accompanied by a delightfully ditzy Companion Cow. Needing to plow, plant, water and harvest in a comparatively short period —or stroll around to explore the farmland— teens reported that they became distracted from their pain, and surprisingly, their “nausea and loneliness.”

Goal: This VR game aims to gamify pain distraction for hospitalized teens who are experiencing boredom, loneliness and discomfort during chemotherapy treatments and recovery in bed. The team wanted to offer a VR game that might benefit and have meaning for the teen patients, taking into account their physical and psycho-logical context. Two of the designers survived cancer in high school.

Design Approach. The concept of a farm seeks to implicitly symbolize hope and growth for patients, as well as to provide them with everyday encouragement to look outside of themselves by maintaining a farm, interacting with a Companion Cow and enjoying rewarding achievements. 

Co-design. The development team met with 12 teens and ‘alumni’ as well as a nurse at the newly-built Childrens Hospital in Vancouver, Canada to collaborate on the design, to test the limits of the interaction techniques and VR effects, and to ensure that we understood their needs and measured appropriate patient outcomes. The teens reported that their time co-designing led to more interactions afterwards.

Tech. We implemented a low-polygon approach to ensure that the VE didn’t trigger more nausea, and relied on gesture sensors so teens could sit or lie down but still make modest physical movements. An HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift (OR) head-mounted display (HMD) was used to see the 3D visuals, and a Leap Motion sensor to detect user actions as teens attended to tasks. Offering first-person perspectives, Farmooo enabled direct physical interactions with farming tools, seeds and soil in an open farm land. The gesture sensor successfully allowed gameplay while sitting or lying down, but had to be modified to pick up the hospitalized patients’ colder-than-average hands. What patients did in the game was automatically <saved> so they could easily return to it after interruptions or bouts of feeling ill.