Virtual Reality in Healthcare: Exploring the Patients’ Behavior through the Lens of Extended Stimulus, Organism, and Response Framework

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is a recently emerged tool in healthcare. However, there is dearth of research since literature lacks studies on factors that enhance patients' visits to VR-health facilities. The current study has proposed a theoretical framework to engulf this gap, employing the stimulus, organism, and response (SOR) framework to investigate patients' attachment, patient’s cognitive and affective response, authentic experience, and intention to visit VR-health facilities. The study has found significant influences of the patients' authentic experience on their cognitive and affective responses. It shows that patients' authentic experience plays a significant role in VR health. The results further verified that patients' cognitive and affective responses have significant mediating effects to predict the attachment and intentions to VR visit. The patients' intention to visit health facilities reveal that attachment to the VR predicts VR-health. Likewise, cognitive response shows a powerful impact compared to the affective response on the intention to visit health facilities over virtual reality. This research brings to fore why prospective patients visit healthcare facilities using virtual reality.