TIMELAPSE

Chemotherapy can involve lengthy treatment sessions, lasting up to several hours. Such a duration, spent in an overly medicalized setting, can induce in the patients a monopolizing focus on their pathology, which leads to a substantial decrease in their mental well-being. One way to alleviate the impact of long chemotherapy sessions would be accelerating subjective time passage as perceived by the patients, therefore making the treatment seemingly end more quickly. Stemming from the ERC Advanced Grant AN-ICON, the TIMELAPSE project proposes to prototype, test, and launch on the market a virtual reality (VR) application that will accelerate subjective time passage during chemotherapy. The idea, whose singular aspects were the object of previous scientific evidence, was so far not implemented comprehensively. TIMELAPSE will fill this R&D gap with unprecedented methods and targets, adopting a patient-centred approach to innovatively incorporate in the conception of the VR application the irreplaceable perspective of its end-users: the oncologic patients. TIMELAPSE will take this idea to proof of concept by means of five subsequent phases: 1. Theoretical elaboration, to shape a theoretical hypothesis concerning what types of VR content might accelerate subjective time passage during chemotherapy; 2. Participatory design, to refine this hypothesis by incorporating the users’ perspective; 3. Production, to develop the content for the VR application, to obtain a prototype ready to be tested. 4. Assessment, to demonstrate the tolerability and effectiveness of the VR application; and 5. Pre-commercialization, to prepare the launch of the VR application on the market. To ensure appropriate methodological tools for each phase, TIMELAPSE will rely on a collaboration between three actors: a core research group (part of the AN-ICON team); an industrial partner expert in VR applications (Khora); and a clinical partner with substantial expertise in cancer treatment (Fondazione IRCCS San Gerardo dei Tintori).