| Key Takeaways |
| Affordability Drives Accessibility: High-quality mental health tools shouldn't require expensive gear. Moving to smartphone-based VR makes immersive relaxation affordable for home use and general healthcare. |
| Prioritize the User Experience: For maximum impact, VR design must focus on realistic nature scenes, native language guidance, and simple, gaze-based controls to minimize distraction. |
| Comfort is Key to Adoption: Success in mobile VR depends on mitigating cybersickness. Removing artificial "forward motion" ensures a more comfortable and viable experience for all users. |
Amandine Verstegen, a PhD student at Ghent University, set out to break these barriers during her internship at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences. Her team’s research, "Designing a Smartphone-Based Virtual Reality App for Relaxation: Qualitative Crossover Study," published in JMIR Formative Research, details the creation of a solution that prioritizes accessibility and user comfort.
To build a better app, Verstegen and her team first looked at what was already working—and what wasn't. They conducted a study where 30 participants tested two popular stand-alone VR relaxation apps, Flowborne and Calm Place. Through inductive thematic analysis, five recurring themes emerged that defined the user experience: audio, visuals, features, implementation, and overall experience.
Participants highlighted several crucial insights:
| In this video, Amandine Verstegen, a PhD student at Ghent University and former intern at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences, explores how to make VR mental health tools more accessible. |
Based on these user insights and an extensive review of existing literature, the team developed the Immersive Mental Health (IMH) app. Unlike apps designed for expensive, stand-alone gear, the IMH app is specifically optimized for smartphone-based VR. This means users only need a standard smartphone and a basic VR viewer to access high-quality relaxation.
The IMH app offers a highly customizable experience tailored to individual preferences:
Custom Environments: Users can choose between a tropical beach, a winter landscape with the Northern Lights, or mountain scenery.
Tailored Exercises: The app includes three types of exercises: free exploration, mindfulness, and progressive muscle relaxation.
A major success of the IMH app's design is its focus on implementation. By eliminating the need for complex stand-alone headsets and expensive sensors, the app makes VR relaxation a viable tool for home use and general healthcare settings. Furthermore, the design team intentionally removed "forward motion" within the virtual world while the user is stationary, a move specifically aimed at reducing cybersickness—a common complaint in mobile VR.
Verstegen chose to publish in JMIR Formative Research because the journal’s focus on the design and early-stage innovation of health technologies provided the perfect platform to share these foundational design principles. While further research is needed to evaluate the long-term clinical effectiveness of the app, this study provides a useful roadmap for making immersive mental health tools available to a global, budget-conscious audience.
Curious to see how mobile technology is making immersive therapy more affordable? Watch the video featuring Amandine Verstegen and read the full research article to explore the design principles behind the IMH app.
Please cite as:
Verstegen A, Van Daele T, Bonroy B, Debard G, Sels R, van Loo M, Bernaerts S
Designing a Smartphone-Based Virtual Reality App for Relaxation: Qualitative Crossover Study
JMIR Form Res 2025;9:e62663
URL: https://formative.jmir.org/2025/1/e62663
DOI: 10.2196/62663