Through the immersive virtual reality platform, this project will address the need to harness personalised, technology-enhanced interactive experiences among palliative care patients.
The COVID-19 crisis provided stark evidence that the ability to maintain health in sustainable yet autonomous ways is crucial for those who are unwell. The crisis highlighted how the needs of people with chronic conditions or those in palliative care were ‘invisible’. These factors reinforce the 2018 National Palliative Care Strategy that stressed the need to harness personalised, technology- enhanced, interactive experiences to improve palliative care outcomes.
Amidst this wider context and drawing on the immersive virtual reality platform, the work in this project brings a lens of human-centred design to medical treatment. One of the effects of this is to provide agency to patients in order to better manage physical symptoms and access a wider range of programs involving mindfulness, wellbeing and connectedness. Similarly, solutions for the treatment of chronic diseases such as cancer and neurological disorders will be informed by the work.
Naseem Ahmadpour, Phillip Gough, Melanie Lovell, Philip Austin, Philip Poronnik, Wendy Qi Zhang, Judy Kay, Bob Kummerfeld, Tim Luckett, Martin Brown, Jane L. Phillips, and Meera Agar. 2023. How can HCI support end-of-life care? Critical perspectives on sociotechnical imaginaries for palliative care. In proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, Article 157. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585768
Associate Professor Naseem Ahmadpour, University of Sydney
Dr Phillip Gough, University of Sydney
Professor Philip Poronnik, University of Sydney
Martin Brown, University of Sydney
Professor Judy Kay, University of Sydney
Professor Bob Kummerfeld, University of Sydney
Professor Melanie Lovell, HammondCare
Dr Tim Luckett, IMPACCT Centre
Professor Meera Agar, IMPACCT Centre
Professor Jane Philips, University of Technology Sydney
Dr Phil Austin, Research Fellow and Osteopath
