Feasibility of Delivering an Avatar Life-review Intervention to Support Patients With Active Cancer

Feasibility of Delivering an Avatar Life-review Intervention to Support Patients With Active Cancer

The objective of the study is to determine the feasibility and acceptability of an integrated art and technology, storytelling, life review platform for patients with active cancer. The VoicingHan project is an avatar storytelling platform designed for patients with advanced cancer receiving palliative care at Virginia Commonwealth University's Massey Cancer Center. VoicingHan supports terminally ill patients by using oral storytelling as an artistic medium to facilitate patients' interactive performances. Movement-based, creative expression has been shown to reduce stress and depression. By projecting movement-based actions onto an avatar, this can serve as a tool to express emotional distress, address satisfaction with care, and view cancer in a different light.

Life reviews have been used in palliative care to help individuals integrate memories into a meaningful whole, providing a balanced view of the past, present and future. Life review is also an evaluative process, enabling participants to examine how memories contribute to the meaning of their life.

VoicingHan, the software program that will be used in this study, provides an illusion that the Avatar is speaking, allowing users to observe their stories in real time, potentially encouraging deeper reflection and memory retrieval. The technology uses motion capture (MoCap) to translate human movement into a digital platform. MoCap offers several advantages: lightweight, sensitive to minute movement, and user-friendly.

Patients will select avatars from different age groups during their sessions, allowing them to retrieve specific, positive memories of different lifetime periods and facilitating a more candid autobiographical memory. Creative expression may serve as a vehicle for patients with a life limiting illness in finding purpose and creating a sense of meaning. The integration of art and technology into a storytelling, life-review platform through means of engaging the physical, psychological, and spiritual domains will support patients to contemplate their own mortality.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Participants must be 18 years of age or older
• Patient participants must have metastatic or locally recurrent cancer
• Participants must be able to understand English
• Participants must be ambulatory
• Ability and willingness to sign a written informed consent document

Exclusion Criteria:

• Participants who cannot understand written or spoken English
• Any prisoner and/or other vulnerable persons as defined by NIH (45 CFR 46, Subpart B, C and D).