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The Effects of Sport-Specific Virtual Reality Conditions on Attention and Pain in Healthy Baseball Athletes

Title:

The Effects of Sport-Specific Virtual Reality Conditions on Attention and Pain in Healthy Baseball Athletes

Warsh, Steven ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5030-0516 (2024) The Effects of Sport-Specific Virtual Reality Conditions on Attention and Pain in Healthy Baseball Athletes. Masters thesis, Concordia University.

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Abstract

Virtual reality is no longer a dream, the future is here. Virtual Reality (VR) offers endless potential for individualized rehabilitation for patients and previous research has established use- cases for multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injuries, burn victims and stroke patients. With respect to sports, VR studies have primarily been focused on training skills or rehabilitation for injured soccer athletes. There is a lack of research on VR’s use as a rehabilitation tool for ball sport athletes. This study aimed to investigate whether health care professionals could use VR for injury rehabilitation as a pain management, immersion and flow tool on these athletes. We conducted a within-subjects design to investigate the effectiveness of VR as a distractor from chemically induced pain by Capsaicin, mimicking real injuries, using a sample of Canadian baseball athletes. Our research questions focused on investigating to what extent being immersed in a sport-specific activity had on how much flow and immersion was experienced, thereby reducing pain even greater than a non-sport specific activity. We randomized the order of three tasks, a non-baseball computer condition (Two-Back), an easy VR baseball practice condition and a challenging hard VR baseball game condition. While the results showed a decrease in pain, they were not statistically or clinically significant. However, our results did show that VR conditions produced a statistically significantly higher and comparable level of immersion and flow for both difficulties, when compared to the Two-Back task. For clinicians who want to immerse an athlete in their sport outside of the field of play, this research shows that Virtual Reality is a valid option.

Divisions:Concordia University > Faculty of Arts and Science > Health, Kinesiology and Applied Physiology
Item Type:Thesis (Masters)
Authors:Warsh, Steven
Institution:Concordia University
Degree Name:M. Sc.
Program:Health and Exercise Science
Date:18 August 2024
Thesis Supervisor(s):Dover, Geoffrey
Keywords:Virtual Reality, VR, XR, Pain, Baseball, Rehabilitation, Athletic Therapy, Injury Rehab, Flow, Immersion,
ID Code:994456
Deposited By: STEVEN WARSH
Deposited On:24 Oct 2024 17:25
Last Modified:24 Oct 2024 17:25

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