Effect of Virtual Reality Distraction on Pain Perception during Dental Treatment in Children

positive dental attitudes for future visits.1 Despite improvements in pain medication, effective pain and anxiety control continues to be a challenge for the pediatric dentists, making children wanting to avoid dental treatment. Distracting the child appears to be the most common nonpharmacological technique used for behavior management during dental procedures. Distraction is the technique of diverting the patient’s attention from what may be perceived as an unpleasant procedure.1 The process of distraction appears to involve competition for attention between a highly salient sensation like pain and consciously directed focus on some other information processing activity. Although the precise mechanism of distraction is not yet well understood, cognitive-affective attention models may explain this phenomenon3. McCaul and Mallet3 developed the existing theory by placing emphasis on the fact that the capacity of humans to pay attention is limited. They point out that an individual should concentrate on the painful stimuli in order to perceive pain; therefore, perception of pain decreases when a person’s attention is distracted away from the stimulus. In recent years, there has been an increase in behavioral research in virtual reality (VR) and virtual world. The VR refers to a human-computer interface that enables the user to interact dynamically with the computergenerated environment. In contrast to the less complex audiovisual (A/V) distraction, VR uses sophisticated systems, such as head-mounted, wide field of view; threedimensional head-mount displays (HMDs) and motion sensing systems that measure the user’s head and hand positions. This application may be superior to traditional distraction because it offers more immersive images due to the occlusive headsets that project the images right in front of the eyes of the user and, depending on the model used, block out real-world (visual, auditory, or both) stimuli. The VR even combines the audio, visual, and kinesthetic sensory modalities. Depending on how immersive the presented stimuli are, the person’s attention will be more or less “drained” from the real-world, leaving less attention available to real-world processes, including painful stimuli. Immersion is particularly increased during VR, because the use of HMDs prevents patients from seeing what is happening in the real-world, Professor and Head