Background Colonoscopy is currently one of the most recommended screening methods to prevent colorectal cancer. Due to drug-induced sedation comes with the risk of complications in some cases, colonoscopy without sedation is still usually performed. How to relieve the pain, in this case, is an important problem to be solved.

Methods Based on the features of colonoscopy and the advantages of virtual reality (VR), our research developed an endoscopist-patient co-participative VR (EPC-VR) tool to deal with the perceived pain of patients undergoing colonoscopy. It includes an immersive VR music game for the patients to easily play while lying on the surgical bed. Moreover, it can help endoscopists understand the patients’ pain by sensing their hand grip force and support an endoscopist in actively triggering the game distraction mechanism to attract patients’ attention from the perception of the medical process. We performed a comparative clinic study with 25 patients as participants. The patient’s pain was evaluated with the data of a hand-held pressure sensor, psychological scale, and interview.

Results Results show that (i) hand-held pressure provides effective measures of pain, which helps prove the effectiveness of EPC-VR in reducing the patient’s pain level undergoing colonoscopy; (ii) the active intervention of endoscopists can help relieve the perceived pain of patients undergoing colonoscopy. Ultimately, 81.25% of patients indicated that if they were to undergo a colonoscopy again, they would choose a colonoscopy combined with virtual reality gaming.

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Abstract IDDF2024-ABS-0093 Figure 1

Conclusions In conclusion, we propose and develop EPC-VR, a VR method for endoscopists and patients to co-engage in order to reduce pain during colonoscopy. It provides interactive, immersive VR for patients for the first time and supports the co-participation of endoscopists. The majority of participants felt that the use of VR application was effective in reducing pain and negative emotions during colonoscopy, demonstrating a high level of acceptance of the method.