Background/Purpose:
Osteoarthritis (OA) is associated with chronic pain in the joints, which affects many individuals’ daily function and quality of life. The sense of embodiment (SoE) is an illusory perception that an artificial body belongs to the real one and has been suggested to have analgesic effects for chronic pain (Baker et al, 2022). SoE can be facilitated through virtual reality (VR) and spherical video-based virtual reality (SVVR) (Serino et al., 2023). These studies suggest pre-recorded SVVR can be used as a non-pharmacological approach for pain modulation. This study evaluates the analgesic effects of embodiment-inducing SVVR in people with hand OA. We hypothesized that people with pain due to hand OA would have significantly reduced pain after SVVR.

Methods:
We recruited 10 individuals with hand OA who completed the study in a single visit. We used a within-subjects pre-post design to evaluate the analgesics effects of a 5-minute SVVR intervention delivered through the Meta Quest 2 VR headset. Participants’ subjective pain intensity ratings were recorded using a standard (0-10) numeric rating scale (NRS) before, during, and after the intervention. We measured the level of embodiment and presence the participants experienced from the SVVR using the Embodiment Questionnaire (EQ) and the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ).

Data analysis: We used a Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test to determine the significance of change scores. We calculated the effect size r with the following criteria: small 0.10-0.29; moderate 0.30-0.49; large ≥ 0.50.

Results:
The SVVR significantly reduced pain intensity in people with hand OA during (p= .02; r= .82) and immediately following (p= .01; r= .90) the intervention with large effect sizes. Pain intensity was no longer significantly reduced (from baseline) at the end of the study visit (p= .16; r= 50). The SVVR was moderately effective in facilitating a sense of embodiment and presence in the participants (EQ= 3.9, IPQ= 4.3; out of a seven-point Likert scale). (See Table)

Conclusion:
The SVVR intervention significantly reduced pain intensity in people with Hand OA during a single brief treatment. However, the acute analgesic effects were not sustained throughout of the full study visit, suggesting that additional (or longer) treatments might be required in order to maintain the reductions in pain. EQ and IPQ levels show moderate embodiment-inducing effects, suggesting that mechanisms such as distraction may be contributing to the intervention’s pain-relieving effects.
Baker, N. A., Polhemus, A. H., Ospina, E. H., Feller, H., Zenni, M., Deacon, M., DeGrado, G., Basnet, S., & Driscoll, M. (2022). The state of science in the use of virtual reality in the treatment of acute and chronic pain. The Clinical Journal of Pain, 38(6), 424–441. https://doi.org/10.1097/ajp.0000000000001029
Serino, S., Sansoni, M., Di Lernia, D., Parisi, A., Tuena, C., & Riva, G. (2023). 360-degree video-based body-ownership illusion for inducing embodiment: Development and feasibility results. Virtual Reality, 27, 2665–2672. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-023-00836-6

Table showing pre-post measures of pain with effects of SVVR

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/effects-of-360-virtual-reality-embodiment-videos-on-pain-in-hand-osteoarthritis-a-within-subject-pre-post-study/