Changes in The Perception of Postoperative Delirium Before and After a Simulated Experience of Postoperative Delirium in Nursing Students

The purpose of this study is to use Unity to recreate the hallucinations and auditory hallucinations experienced by patients who develop delirium, and to use VR to reveal the changes in perception of delirium before and after the simulated experience of delirium to nursing college students. We used VR to recreate the ICU at night and created a video of a simulated postoperative delirium experience. The duration is 12 minutes. We set up scenes of cockroaches appearing on the ceiling, the ceiling closing in on them, people in protective clothing, and soldiers attacking at two-minute intervals. Oculus Quest was used as the head-mounted display (HMD) for viewing the VR images. The target participants were 17 students in the second to the fourth year of nursing college. The target students were asked to answer two questions before and after the viewing. The interview content was analyzed by comparing the differences in speaking time, amount of speech and content before and after the VR viewing for each student and by text mining. The results showed that using VR to simulate postoperative delirium can lead to a change in perception from understanding the inner life of patients with postoperative delirium.