NCT06003439

Vaping Prevention and Vaping in Youth (Vapechat)

Virtual Reality for the Prevention and Cessation of Nicotine Vaping in Youth

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 119 (actual)
• Sponsor: Boston University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 13 Years – 19 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Many youth are addicted to nicotine due to increased nicotine vaping (e.g., e-cigarettes). Unfortunately, there are no effective interventions to help teens quit vaping. In addition, existing vaping prevention programs have limited effectiveness because teens have reported that existing available interventions are out of touch with teen's culture and are not appealing to the intended audience. Therefore, to be effective, a vaping intervention must be acceptable, appealing, and engaging to teens, and most importantly, it should be designed to be channeled into an existing infrastructure such as the school setting. The investigators' research group has designed a vaping prevention and cessation intervention that is implemented as a VR game for high school teens. The overall objective of this research is to assess the acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of the VR experience among high school students in two high schools in Boston.

Detailed description

The investigators will conduct a randomized trial of high school students (freshman to seniors) in the Boston area to determine feasibility, satisfaction, and preliminary efficacy of the VR-based vaping cessation and prevention game. Students will be randomized by class to either receive the Virtual Reality (VR) program (experimental condition) or control condition (questionnaire assessment only). There will be three VR sessions played at school during a health class. Participants in the VR condition will also engage in a gamified home-based component on their smartphone, in order to reinforce skills learned in the school-based VR experience. Seven high school classes across two high schools will be randomized to VR intervention or assessment only. Health classes in each high school will be randomly assigned using a 1:3 threshold probability using a random digit generator. Participants will be enrolled in the study for approximately 6 weeks. In the first 3 weeks, participants will engage in the VR game experience once per week during their classes. In the fourth and fifth week, participants may make up any VR game session that they missed because of absence (e.g., illness). At week 6, participants will complete the follow-up questionnaire assessments.

Conditions

• Vaping
• Smoking Cessation

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Virtual Reality Program	Behavioral: Virtual Reality Program The VR Program will be pre-installed on Meta Quest 2 headsets, which will be donned by students as a class to experience the intervention for approximately the length of one school class period (approximately 30-40 minutes). Each participant will experience the program once a week for 3 weeks. Participants who missed a week will complete the program by the 4th or 5th week.
BEHAVIORAL	VR Program	VR program participants will be able to download a mobile app that complements and reinforces the school-based VR session.

Timeline

• Start date: 2024-04-04
• Primary completion: 2024-06-07
• Completion: 2024-06-07
• First posted: 2023-08-22
• Last updated: 2024-06-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States