Mission
Our mission is to enhance chemotherapy with innovative methods, by relying on theoretical models and adopting a patient-centered design approach.
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Project
TIMELAPSE: a VR application for speeding up time passage during chemotherapy
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 ERC Proof of Concept TIMELAPSE 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 participatory and patient-centred design approach to innovatively incorporate in the conception of the VR application the irreplaceable perspective of its end-users: the oncologic patients.
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 from UNIMI); an industrial partner expert in VR applications for healthcare (Khora); and a clinical partner (Fondazione IRCCS San Gerardo dei Tintori – UNIMIB) with substantial expertise in cancer treatment.
Phases & Activities
TIMELAPSE will take its ground-breaking idea to proof of concept through 5 subsequent phases within 18 months (June 2024 - November 2025).
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