Pain perception and visual feedback in virtual reality
PubDate: Sep 2019
Teams: Seoul National University；Joongbu University
Writers: Minhee Seo；Sangbin Jeon；Byungcheol Kim；Jehkwang Ryu；Kyoungmin Lee
PDF: Pain perception and visual feedback in virtual reality
Abstract
Previous researches reported that pain threshold increased when body ownership illusion was induced. Body ownership illusion refers to a phenomenon which feels like the objects other than original body parts become one of them. Researchers used rubber hand illusion paradigm to manipulate body ownership. There are results which claim rubber hand illusion itself increases pain threshold but reports are inconsistent. On the other hand, when body ownership illusion is experienced in the immersive virtual reality environment, pain threshold tends to increase. However, a proper visualization of pain stimulants (thermometer, algometer, etc.) was absent or not reported. If there was no visualization of stimulants, it could have introduced intermodal mismatch during the experiment. Therefore, present experiment aims to get rid of this confounding factor by comparing the conditions related to visualization of pain stimulants in virtual reality.
A head mounted display (HMD, htc VIVE) was used to provide immersive virtual reality environment. Leap motion was attached on the front side of HMD for hand tracking. Visuo-tactile stimulation was given by a haptic device, Geomagic Touch®. The environment of virtual reality was constructed by using UNITY. During the procedure, participants wearing HMD see their virtual hand colocated with their ipsilateral original hand. They received 90 s of synchronous visuo-tactile stimulation to induce body ownership illusion. Then pressure pain threshold was measured by an algometer with or without visualization of it.
The result shows that increase of pressure pain threshold still exists when there was proper visualization of pain stimulants. However, sample size needs to be increased to reach enough statistical power.
