NCT03996642

Feasibility of Delivering an Avatar Life-review Intervention to Support Patients With Active Cancer

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 11 (actual)
• Sponsor: Virginia Commonwealth University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

The objective of the study is to determine the feasibility and acceptability of an integrated art and technology, storytelling, life review platform for patients with active cancer. The VoicingHan project is an avatar storytelling platform designed for patients with advanced cancer receiving palliative care at Virginia Commonwealth University's Massey Cancer Center. VoicingHan supports terminally ill patients by using oral storytelling as an artistic medium to facilitate patients' interactive performances. Movement-based, creative expression has been shown to reduce stress and depression. By projecting movement-based actions onto an avatar, this can serve as a tool to express emotional distress, address satisfaction with care, and view cancer in a different light.

Detailed description

Life reviews have been used in palliative care to help individuals integrate memories into a meaningful whole, providing a balanced view of the past, present and future. Life review is also an evaluative process, enabling participants to examine how memories contribute to the meaning of their life. VoicingHan, the software program that will be used in this study, provides an illusion that the Avatar is speaking, allowing users to observe their stories in real time, potentially encouraging deeper reflection and memory retrieval. The technology uses motion capture (MoCap) to translate human movement into a digital platform. MoCap offers several advantages: lightweight, sensitive to minute movement, and user-friendly. Patients will select avatars from different age groups during their sessions, allowing them to retrieve specific, positive memories of different lifetime periods and facilitating a more candid autobiographical memory. Creative expression may serve as a vehicle for patients with a life limiting illness in finding purpose and creating a sense of meaning. The integration of art and technology into a storytelling, life-review platform through means of engaging the physical, psychological, and spiritual domains will support patients to contemplate their own mortality.

Conditions

• Cancer

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Avatar Life Review	VoicingHan will screen-capture patient's storytelling performances as video files. Immediately before the first intervention, patients will complete an array of self-reported questionnaires to assess physical, spiritual, and psychological well-being and elicit relevant demographic and medical information. The assessments include the ESAS, FACIT-Sp subscale, and EORTC PAL 15. Subsequent administration of these questionnaires spaced 2-4 weeks apart will occur before each avatar session (pre-intervention). This will determine if intensity of the patient's symptoms have changed over the course of the intervention. Following completion of the Avatar session, a member of the research team will conduct a semi-structured, open-ended interview to assess patients' perception of intervention components and identify possible factors influencing intervention feasibility and any technical barriers.

Timeline

• Start date: 2019-07-19
• Primary completion: 2019-08-30
• Completion: 2019-10-23
• First posted: 2019-06-25
• Last updated: 2020-02-06

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States