NCT06911996

The WOW Project (WOW): Wonders Of The World Through Virtual Reality for Hospitalized Children

Immersive Bedside Teaching for Hospitalized Pediatric Patient - A Prospective, Mixed-method, Cohort Study

• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 100 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Stanford University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 5 Years – 17 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Hospitalized pediatric patients are unable to leave the hospital to engage in traditional learning environments. Patients often feel depressed, disconnected from learning, and socially withdrawn. The Stanford Chariot Program proposes a partnership with the Palo Alto Unified Hospital School at Stanford Children's Health to reignite patients' emotional well-being through learning. The WOW Project aims to use virtual reality (VR) to travel with hospitalized children to the Wonders of the World (WOW). Combining this immersive learning modality with complementary hands-on activities at the bedside, the investigators will transport them from their hospital room into a nurturing virtual environment to stimulate their emotional, mental, and social growth while they are physically healing. The investigators will evaluate their overall joy and awe of learning by using standardized emotional scales.

Conditions

• Virtual Reality

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Virtual Reality	After obtaining written consent, participants will be asked to complete a brief demographic survey and pre-intervention surveys (content knowledge, and wellbeing surveys). They will then be equipped with a VR headset, Quest 3 (Meta, Inc., Menlo Park, CA) displaying the educational field trip. After the VR field trip, participants will participate in a complementary hands-on science experiment. At the conclusion of the experiment, patients will be asked to complete the post intervention surveys (i.e awe, content knowledge, and wellbeing surveys). Additionally, for the first 20 participants, 15 participants will be randomly selected and asked to participate in a 5 open-ended question qualitative interview regarding engagement of the lesson. Audio will be recorded via zoom.

Timeline

• Start date: 2025-07-10
• Primary completion: 2026-08-31
• Completion: 2026-08-31
• First posted: 2025-04-04
• Last updated: 2025-10-20

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States