This year all donations to the “Believe in The Magic of Christmas”, the 9th Annual Christmas Expo & Winter Breedables Faire, in support of the Expo’s mission to Fight Childhood Cancer, will be dedicated to help provide funding for VR Headsets for childhood cancer patients. Along with Linden Lab, their partner in the fight against cancer, and our sponsors and participants, the Expo will be working to reach the Goal of $20,000 to help fund the Society’s Virtual Reality Program for Pediatric Cancer Patients undergoing cancer treatment.
Medical procedures can be scary to anyone, especially kids. The American Cancer Society is exploring ways to help reduce anxiety and pain related to cancer treatment. The Society partnered with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and helped provide the power of virtual reality to kids with cancer like 9-year-old Ryleigh.
WHY VR?
The American Cancer Society and Children’s Hospital of Atlanta (CHOA) have partnered to provide virtual reality (VR) headsets for pediatric cancer patients to use while undergoing various cancer treatments within the hospital.
- For over 100 years, the American Cancer Society has provided patient services to improve the lives of cancer patients. The virtual reality pediatric program uses innovative technology to further expand the services offered to pediatric cancer patients in an extremely impactful and relevant way.
- Research suggests that ideal distraction tasks consume some portion of attentional resources so that less cognitive capacity remains available for processing pain.
- Distraction is a pain management technique that has been shown to successfully reduce pain and behavioral distress in children during invasive medical procedures. VR distraction is a promising intervention for children undergoing painful medical procedures and is an ideal distractor for procedure-related pain because it competes for attention resources in multiple sensory domains and provides visual and auditory sensory blocking of external stimuli...
- 19 studies across nearly 1,000 articles have explored the effects of VR interventions with cancer patients. These studies found:
- VR improved patients’ emotional well-being
- A reduction in patients’ distress in terms of cancer-related psychological symptoms.
- A significant decrease in anxiety, distress, and fatigue immediately after chemotherapy sessions with VR
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