A virtual reality home-based training for the management of stress and anxiety among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Healthcare workers represent one of the most affected categories by the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. Excessive stress and anxiety are critical factors that could compromise work performance. Besides, high levels of stress and anxiety may have long-term physical and psychological consequences. Recent studies investigated virtual reality to reduce stress and anxiety among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the proposed virtual reality interventions have important limitations related to their location (i.e., research lab and hospitals) and content (i.e., virtual experiences only for relaxation). Within this context, this randomized controlled trial aims to investigate the efficacy and acceptability of a brief home-based virtual reality training for managing stress and anxiety during the COVID-19 crisis in a sample of Italian healthcare workers. METHODS: The study is a randomized controlled trial. It includes two groups of 30 individuals recruited from healthcare workers: (1) the experimental group and (2) the control group. Participants in the experimental group will receive a training consisting of three home sessions performed in a week. In each session, participants will try through an immersive virtual reality standalone system (i.e., Oculus Quest 2) a virtual psychoeducation experience on stress and anxiety (i.e., MIND-VR). Subsequently, they will try the virtual relaxation content (i.e., The Secret Garden). The control group will receive no training and will be reassessed one week and one month after the initial evaluation. DISCUSSION: If the proposed brief home-based virtual reality training will result helpful and easy to use, it could become an empirically assessed viable option for protecting healthcare workers' mental health both during the COVID-19 pandemic and once it will be over. Furthermore, the intervention might be easily adapted for other categories of people who need support in managing stress and anxiety. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04611399 .
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Current research has inconclusive evidence of VR efficacy because some studies involved researchers directly during interventions or were not yet finished.
“However, a notable gap in current research pertains to the inconclusive evidence of its efficacy, given that certain studies have involved researchers directly during interventions or not yet finished (7, 8, 22).”
From A systematic review on the efficacy of virtual reality and gamification interventions for managing anxiety and depression (2023) · cites this paper as [22]
The Trial status section (page unavailable) says recruitment was ongoing and data collection would continue, so this protocol could not yet provide efficacy results. The Introduction’s Background and rationale identifies laboratory and hospital settings as limitations of earlier studies, but does not say researchers directly participated in the interventions or that VR efficacy overall was inconclusive; it describes prior findings as promising. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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- Authors
- Pallavicini, F., Orena, E., di Santo, S., Greci, L., Caragnano, C., Ranieri, P., Vuolato, C., Pepe, A., Veronese, G., Stefanini, S., Achille, F., Dakanalis, A., Bernardelli, L., Sforza, F., Rossini, A., Caltagirone, C., Fascendini, S., Clerici, M., Riva, G., & Mantovani, F.
- Affiliations
- University of Milano-Bicocca (IT)
- Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta (IT)
- National Research Council (IT)
- Fondazione Europea Ricerca Biomedica (IT)
- Fondazione Santa Lucia (IT)
- Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Pallavicini, Federica
- ORCID
- Venue
- Trials
- Published
- 2022-06-02
- Volume
- 23
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 451-451
- ISSN
- 1745-6215 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC9161181
- OpenAlex
- W4281958864
- Cited by
- 37
- References
- 83
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 4
- FWCI
- 7.08
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Trials (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- BOA (University of Milano-Bicocca) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › COVID-19 and Mental Health
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
- Keywords
- virtual reality, home-based exercise, stress management, anxiety reduction, healthcare workers, COVID-19 pandemic, mental health, The Secret Garden, immersive virtual reality, Oculus Quest 2, treatment acceptability
- MeSH terms
- Virtual Reality, COVID-19, Anxiety, Health Personnel, Humans, Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic, Pandemics
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