UTFacultiesBMSDept HIBPHTUT Virtual Reality for patients with severe fatigue symptoms

UT Virtual Reality for patients with severe fatigue symptoms

Virtual Reality for patients with severe fatigue symptoms

Type of assignment:                    MA internship (combination with thesis is possible)

Internal or external?:                   internal

Maximum number of students:    1-2

Individual collecting of data?        Yes

Type of research:                        Mixed methods

Description of the assignment:

For your internship and thesis you can participate in a research collaboration between the department Health Psychology & Technology and the BMSLab.

Virtual reality is a promising technology to improve well-being since it is fun to use, immerse the user into another world, offers environments for exploring and practicing new behaviors and reactions and is able to effectively change mood states.

In your internship and probably also in your master thesis you will concentrate on possibilities VR offers for patients with severe fatigue symptoms. This can be patients with different diseases since severe fatigue is one of the symptoms in many diseases.

Our aim is to further develop the VR environment Walk in Nature (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej_JeyGRD9A&t) and to explore how it can be the best applied in the different groups of patients.

“Walk in Nature” is developed in collaboration with the BMS Lab and master students from the psychology programme and we already tested the application in different student populations and in people with rheumatic diseases. These tests revealed what should be changed for the next level of improvements of the VR application.

Which tasks you can execute in your internship (and probably a following master thesis) is dependent on your technical and/ or language proficiencies.

If you are able to or willing to learn programming in Unity (https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/what-is-unity/?tab=overview#), you can work on the improvement of the application Walk in Nature.

If you have C1 Dutch language proficiency you might consider interviews with different patient groups with severe fatigue symptoms to find out whether they would be willing to use a VR application as ‘Walk in Nature’ as a self-management tool at home.

If these are no options for you, you can find out in this internship whether there are other VR applications aiming at improvement of fatigue by VR internationally by desk research but also by finding innovative ways to learn about applications.

What are we offering? Working with an interdisciplinary team

More information?: Dr. Christina Bode (c.bode@utwente.nl)

Supervisor: Dr. Christina Bode (UT)