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This poster video is part of "Health is Social: Leveraging the Metaverse to Improve Public Health," the virtual conference of the UConn Center for mHealth and Social Media, May 18-19, 2023. Registration still open: https://mhealth.inchip.uconn.edu/chas...

Virtual Reality for Retaining Next Generation of Blood Donors

Joy Li - Kennesaw State University
Maria Valero - Kennesaw State Univerity

Background:
There is an urgent societal need to successfully recruit a younger generation (ages 18-39) of sustainable blood donors to complement and eventually replace the aging baby boomer generation. This requires novel approaches to the blood supply chain to create a sustainable blood donor base. Virtual reality (VR) experiences can be used to educate, prepare, and distract donors during the blood donation process by immersing them in a virtual environment. In this project, we propose designing a VR application to help recruit and retain younger generation donors.

Objective:
The objective of this project is to design a VR application for young donors that enhance the blood donation experience during their visits to donor centers.  

Methods:
A VR prototype will be designed considering the following aspects: attractive to the young generation, helpful in reducing anxiety and fear, educational and informative. The VR scenario will be designed following a topology manner. At the beginning of the app, it will provide mandatory educational and Informative scenes. As a virtual theatre, it will introduce the blood donation process, the importance of donating blood, and the impact it can have on people's lives. The content will help young donors understand the value of their donation and motivate them to donate and encourage their friends to donate in the future. After the enforced watching, a selection of virtual reality experiences will appear as the user options. The donor will be able to use their unoccupied hand to choose from the options. They may choose a VR theater for short video collections. They may also choose a relaxing environment, such as a beach or a forest, where they do not need to do much but sit back and enjoy the scenery and harmonious music. What is more, they may choose a few interactable minigames, such as trivia games, memory games, and sports games with simple interaction mechanisms.  In addition, we will use qualitative analysis from interviews to determine VR module length, interactive movement that will not disturb blood flow, and space allocation.

Results:
We expect to answer the following research questions: R.Q.1 - How do we design an app to target the 18-39 age donors' group to use this app?  R.Q.2 - How do we design VR experience to target the 18-39 age donors' group? 

Conclusions:
In this work, we present an idea of utilizing VR capabilities to recruit, engage and retain young generation blood donors to cover the current need for a sustainable donors' base. The project looks to mix VR scenarios that first educate donors while they are donating blood and second help to overcome fear and anxiety problems.