Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

VaccineHero: An XR System That Reduces Toddler’s Discomfort during Vaccination

Stavros Antonopoulos
* ORCID logo ,
Vasiliki Rentoula
ORCID logo ,
Manolis Wallace
ORCID logo ,
Vassilis Poulopoulos
,
Georgios Lepouras
ORCID logo
Version 1 : Received: 7 August 2023 / Approved: 8 August 2023 / Online: 8 August 2023 (04:03:10 CEST)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Antonopoulos, S.; Rentoula, V.; Wallace, M.; Poulopoulos, V.; Lepouras, G. VaccineHero: An Extended Reality System That Reduces Toddlers’ Discomfort during Vaccination. Electronics 2023, 12, 3851. Antonopoulos, S.; Rentoula, V.; Wallace, M.; Poulopoulos, V.; Lepouras, G. VaccineHero: An Extended Reality System That Reduces Toddlers’ Discomfort during Vaccination. Electronics 2023, 12, 3851.

Abstract

In this work we present VaccineHero, an eXtended Reality system that aims to reduce children’s discomfort during vaccination. In our proposal the child wears a headset during vaccination and watches a short story in VR. The story includes a hero touching the child’s arm and the doctor synchronises the insertion of the needle with the VR content, so that the child is distracted efficiently. A clinical trial has been carried out, involving 2 doctors and a cohort of 16 children, and has shown that the use of VaccineHero reduces children’s discomfort during vaccination by a staggering 40% and totally eliminates extreme discomfort. The implemented solution is extremely affordable, as it can be deployed on simple headsets or even Cardboard devices, a feature that makes it a realistic option for any paediatric practice. It can also be extended to support other medical activities that involve needles, such as blood draw and blood donation.

Keywords

Vaccination; discomfort; extended reality; toddlers

Subject

Public Health and Healthcare, Primary Health Care

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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