In an oral food challenge, a child eats growing doses of the food they're allergic to. Our team was tasked with finding a technology-based intervention to reduce patient anxiety during the challenge.
The design problem
To understand where the anxiety actually came from, I spent months observing food challenges at Stanford Children's Hospital and mapped the full patient journey, from check-in to the final dose. The hospital itself was a big part of the stress: the waiting, the monitoring, the hours in an unfamiliar room.
Families already used the tablets and toys to pass the time between doses. The hardest moment was the dose itself, eating the food you've been told your whole life could hurt you, and nothing helped there. Distraction stopped working exactly when kids needed it most.
So instead of distracting from the bite, we made the bite the reward.
The interaction
I drew on existing research into technology as distraction in medical settings. One classic study, SnowWorld, found that an icy, snowy VR world reduced pain for burn patients during wound care. Inspired by that idea of opposites, I wanted to create a calm place where patients felt empowered, even powerful, especially at the moment of taking the dose.
Patients put on the headset right before a dose and settle into a quiet, nighttime forest. A forest nymph brings them a magic orb to eat, tracked to a real spoon, and eating it gives them the power to bring the forest back to life.
We prototyped several 3D-printed attachments connecting a spoon to the VR controller. The setup had to work both for older kids who feed themselves and for younger patients fed by a nurse. We also built a companion app for nurses to confirm each bite, since detecting it by proximity alone could trigger false positives.
What the research found
The experience was tested with nine kids and their caregivers. The study was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (opens in new tab). I'm a co-author. Most kids enjoyed it (78%) and wanted to use it at their next food challenge (67%). Most also said they wouldn't be thinking about their dose while in the headset, which was the whole point.
The study also showed us where to take future versions. Every participant found the spoon hard to use while wearing the headset, which pointed toward passthrough and mixed reality. This would keep the world visible while layering the game on top of it.