NCT05948280

Virtual Reality (VR) Based Mindfulness Practice in Relieving Stress in Postgraduate Students

Virtual Reality-supported Mindfulness Practice in Relieving Stress in Postgraduate Students: a Pilot Randomised Controlled Trial

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 45 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Chinese University of Hong Kong · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

University students, especially graduate students, are constantly striving to achieve their goals, and their performance is constantly being evaluated, which creates a plethora of stressors, such as tests, a large amount of content to be learnt, lack of time, getting poor marks, and living up to their expectations. Mindfulness has been demonstrated to benefit one's emotions in a 'non-judgement' way. Evidence suggests that VR-based mindfulness practice may help individuals maintain present-moment awareness and block out distractions and may be more effective than conventional mindfulness approaches. The current pilot study aims to test the feasibility and acceptability of VR-based mindfulness practices in graduate students.

Detailed description

A three-arm, assessor-blinded pilot randomised controlled trial (RCT) will be implemented. Participants will be randomly assigned to either mindfulness group, VR mindfulness group and control group. Participants will be randomised at a 1:1:1 ratio to the intervention groups or control group. Block randomization will be conducted by an independent research assistant using randomly varying block sizes of 4 and 6 to avoid selection bias. This study aims to test the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effects of the VR-based mindfulness practice in improving stress for graduate students. Specific objectives are as follows: 1. To investigate the feasibility and acceptability of the VR-based mindfulness practice in improving stress for graduate students 2. To investigate the preliminary effects of VR-based mindfulness practice in improving stress for graduate students 3. To understand the user experience of mindfulness practice in VR

Conditions

• Student
• Stress
• Virtual Reality
• Mindfulness

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Virtual reality-supported mindfulness	A single mindful stretching exercise provides a conscious stretch of VR scenario. The implementation of VR exercises will be performed by the interventionist who have received training in the application of VR scenarios and have extensive experience in VR research.
OTHER	Mindfulness	The interventionist will guide the participant to do a mindful stretching exercise in the first week. During the second week, the interventionist will send participants an audio recording on how to do mindful stretching exercise via WeChat/WhatsApp.

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-08-01
• Primary completion: 2023-12-01
• Completion: 2024-01-01
• First posted: 2023-07-17
• Last updated: 2023-07-17

Locations

1 site across 1 country: China