Creating Activities to Reduce patient Anxiety, Boredom, and Social isolation (CARES)

CARES focuses on the major societal challenge we have around in-hospital patients that suffer from anxiety, boredom and social isolation. This is especially pronounced for children in in-hospital care. Hospitals have very few resources to deal with this, and as a result, in-unit care times are increased and overall patient well-being is reduced and cost per patient goes up. There is substantial amounts of research that shows that alleviating anxiety, boredom and social isolation has massive benefits, but we lack knowledge about how to do this, and notably how to do this in a sustainable way given the current practical situation in hospitals. The SDU Metaverse Lab addresses this challenge through the application of digital media (AR/VR combined with game technologies) in hospitals, with a full lifecycle approach – i.e., not only doing the research to develop technology and applications but also making the implementation of the resulting solutions into hospital environments and the sustainable, practical long-term use and maintenance of these systems a part of our work. CARES represents spearhead R&D challenge for SDU Metaverse Lab.