Kidney Exploration: A Virtual Reality Experience for Public Understanding of the Structure and Function of the Kidneys

Kidney disease has a major impact on global health and is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Limited disease awareness and basic kidney knowledge may impede early intervention, but this is preventable. Virtual reality (VR), an interactive and accessible digital medium, has been shown to enhance awareness through immersive experience, helping to address the lack of understanding of unobservable internal organs. This study aimed to create a VR experience to increase public awareness about diabetic kidney disease and provide an educational resource on the structure and function of the kidneys. Integrating interactivity and immersive visualization has the potential to facilitate more active learning and increase user engagement about the diabetic kidney. This research utilizes a computerized tomography (CT) dataset to digitally reconstruct anatomically accurate kidneys with their internal structures. It uses groundbreaking untethered technology to facilitate an immersive and interactive self-paced learning experience. Small-scale user testing was conducted with eight participants to assess the usability of the VR experience and its effectiveness to support knowledge acquisition of the kidney’s structure and function. On the one hand, usability was reported lower than expected but within an acceptable margin, which suggested further refinements would be needed to improve the user experience. On the other hand, results were encouraging, suggesting a positive development of knowledge. These experimental results suggest, to a certain extent, that the proposed immersive experience has the potential to support improved public awareness and understanding of the structure and function of the kidney and related pathology.