Research IT

A VR image of clouds and blue sky

Virtual Mindfulness for Diabetics

People with Type 2 diabetes sometimes manage their stress through mindfulness but many find it difficult to practice without support. While there are apps available, many are not engaging enough to sustain use. To address this, researchers from the University and King's College London, partnered with Research IT to create a VR app as part of the VRUnwind project.

More and more people are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes – a chronic condition that occurs when your body doesn't produce enough insulin or doesn't use insulin properly. This means people with Type 2 diabetes have a hard time dealing with sugar.

Research has shown that the constant balancing of diet and testing insulin levels results in between 20-40% of these people (1.5 million in the UK and 190 million around the world) feeling stressed due to the ongoing care required.

Some people with diabetes who feel stressed use a therapy called mindfulness to feel better as it helps them focus on how they think and feel. However, this can be difficult to perform at home without support. There are some phone apps available that can help with mindfulness, but some are not fun to use and people stop using them.

Research IT was approached by Professor Emma Stanmore from the Division of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work and Dr Siobhan O’Connor from King’s College London to create a prototype Virtual Reality (VR) app that aims to find out if mindfulness experiences could help reduce diabetes patients stress as part of the VRUnwind.

Research Software Engineer Andrew Jerrison was assigned to work on the project with the researchers due to his interest in expanding his skill set into VR. Development of the VR app took place over 5 months, using the RSE department’s Agile process to keep in touch with Dr. O’Connor and collect feedback for improvements. In total the development only took approximately 25 days.

Creating the App

In order to make the VR technology as accessible as possible, Google Cardboard was identified as meeting the project requirements by the researchers. The mobile app (VR Unwind) runs on an Android mobile phone, which the user then inserts into a VR cardboard headset. The VR image is created by the screen of the phone splitting a single image into two stereo images using the Cardboard software. The single image assembles using the lenses in the headset and displays to the user.

The VR experiences produced in the app include 360-degree videos and images. They are accompanied by audio tracks recorded by the research team delivering specific mindfulness exercises. Within an experience the user is fixed in space, and surrounded by either a video, image or empty space. The videos were approximately 2 minutes long, one of a beach and the other of a waterfall. One of the images was a photo taken from a mountain top, and the other a computer-generated image of clouds.

VR generate image of clouds and blue sky

The experiences were developed using Unity, a popular game engine. It has Google Cardboard extensions to make it very easy to create simple scenes and interactive objects using scripting in C#, a well-known software development language.

Participants enter and leave an experience by pressing a button on a signpost object in the middle of the virtual room. When a participant in the study enters or leaves the experience the action is recorded anonymously in a logfile. The anonymous analytics are transmitted to Research IT’s own mobile application data collection software called StorageConnect at the end of each session, for future analysis. The research team will analyse how long users spend in each “experience” and how often they use each one to work out which experiences have the most impact.

The Future

The app created by Research IT is currently a proof of concept. If the study is successful in showing that VR can help people with diabetes then further funds will be sought to develop an app for a purpose made VR headset such as the Meta Quest, with added features.

Dr O’Connor said “Working with Andrew and the team was great; they are super organised and the software development process progressed on time with regular check-ins and access to all documents and code on GitHub. They were happy to make even the smallest changes to the design of the interface which resulted in a well-functioning, high-quality app. The VR app even came in lower than originally budgeted for which helped us make the most of this research study!”

Visit the VRUnwind website for more information.