VRImind! - Virtual escape and coming together for cancer patients

A warm light penetrates through the treetops and lets the leaves shine in lush green. Just two clicks away you can listen to the sound of the sea in a bay. All this happens at the Kepler University Hospital and the JKU in Linz - made possible by "Virtual Reality (VR)". For people with advanced cancer, VR offers the chance to escape from the stressful everyday life of the disease. As an innovative alternative to classic imagination therapy (IT), VR-supported imagination (VRI) is to be used in the VRImind! particularly effective in alleviating the patients' symptoms and strengthening their mental resilience. With the help of VR glasses, the patients immerse themselves in a three-dimensional space accompanied by sounds. Psychometric questionnaires, vegetative parameters as well as biofeedback, brain current measurement and functional magnetic resonance imaging should be used as a readout of short, medium and long-term mental effects. It is also planned to allow a "cross-over" in both study arms after completion of four training units, which enables objective IT non-responders to undergo VRI and, conversely, VRI non-responders to undergo IT. Our vision is a virtual, artificial intelligence (AI)-supported, empathetic networking of patients within the VR sessions, including among themselves, in order to enable barrier-free encounters and mutual support in virtual space: a new form of socio-mental togetherness and mutual support of people under mentally highly stressed and physically mobility-restricted conditions.