A virtual reality paradigm simulating blood donation serves as a platform to test interventions to promote donation

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 10334 - 12
• Main Authors: Williams, Lisa A, Tzelios, Kallie, Masser, Barbara, Thijsen, Amanda, van Dongen, Anne, Davison, Tanya E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Nature Publishing Group 06.05.2024; Nature Publishing Group UK; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Blood; Blood & organ donations; Blood Donation; Blood donors; Blood Donors - psychology; Computer applications; Deployment; Emotions; Emotions - physiology; Female; Humans; Intention; Intervention; Male; Middle Aged; Virtual Reality; Young Adult
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-60578-6

Effective interventions that support blood donor retention are needed. Yet, integrating an intervention into the time-pressed and operationally sensitive context of a blood donation center requires justification for disruptions to an optimized process. This research provides evidence that virtual reality (VR) paradigms can serve as a research environment in which interventions can be tested prior to being delivered in blood donation centers. Study 1 (N = 48) demonstrated that 360°-video VR blood donation environments elicit a similar profile of emotional experience to a live donor center. Presence and immersion were high, and cybersickness symptoms low. Study 2 (N = 134) was an experiment deploying the 360°-video VR environments to test the impact of an intervention on emotional experience and intentions to donate. Participants in the intervention condition who engaged in a suite of tasks drawn from the process model of emotion regulation (including attentional deployment, positive reappraisal, and response modulation) reported more positive emotion than participants in a control condition, which in turn increased intentions to donate blood. By showing the promise for benefitting donor experience via a relatively low-cost and low-resource methodology, this research supports the use of VR paradigms to trial interventions prior to deployment in operationally-context field settings.