CONTEXT:

Each year, more than 40 severely burned children aged 6 to 17 are treated at the CHU Sainte-Justine trauma center. The treatment of burns, dressing changes as well as physiotherapy and occupational therapy are considered to be among the most painful medical procedures. These are usually recurrent treatments that generate a lot of anxiety and can leave their long-term negative impact on the child’s memory and relationship to pain. To date, no distraction has been tried to distract these children during these painful procedures.

PROBLEM:

The use of virtual reality as a distraction tool has proven itself as a non-pharmacological therapeutic modality. However, very little data exists on its use in hydrotherapy baths for wound care of burn victims. The absence of a product dedicated to this type of patient, their high pain levels and the many constraints imposed by baths are just some of the obstacles to the use of virtual reality for hydrotherapy sessions. OBJECTIVE: Significantly improve the quality of hospital care given to severely burned patients during hydrotherapy sessions and transform a hospital experience that is a priori negative, or even traumatic, into a fun and positive experience, both for the children and the families. SOLUTION: DREAMLAND is a therapeutic virtual reality video game suitable for young patients from 5 to 17 years old. It works as a distraction tool that can replace or coexist with analgesic medication, that often has deleterious side effects, in order to reduce it or even eliminate it completely. The hardware and the game have been developed specifically to address this problem. DREAMLAND’s game design has been precisely designed to optimize the level of engagement and immersion of the player and thus achieve the desired distraction effect.