The Department of Pediatrics at Qilu Hospital of Shandong University in Jinan, China, evaluated, from June 2024 to December 2025, an immersive virtual reality programme for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Working with researchers from Shandong University of Arts and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the team designed a framework called FOEC to train executive control, and tested it in a randomized controlled trial with 80 children.
How it works
Children in the VR group completed an additional immersive session of about 20 minutes straight after conventional executive-function training. Sessions ran on standalone headsets under researcher supervision in a controlled clinical setting. The interactive application was built in Unity, with 3D assets created in Autodesk Maya.
The experience offers three behavioral modules set in a cartoon playground and similar scenes:
- Prioritized Playtime, which practises waiting and turn-taking before reaching a preferred activity.
- Maintaining Personal Space, which has children regulate their distance from virtual characters in response to the characters' feedback.
- Delayed Waiting Rules, which asks children to wait for environmental cues before acting.
Participation and results
Each child in the VR group was planned to complete 12 sessions over a two-week programme. According to the study authors, all 40 children in the VR group completed all 12 sessions, with no missed sessions or intervention-related attrition.
The authors report that, compared with conventional executive-function training alone, the VR-based intervention showed additional improvements in several executive-control domains, particularly inhibitory control, behavioral regulation, task initiation and planning-related processes. These findings come from the trial's authors and were not uniform across all measures. As the authors acknowledge, the VR group also received extra training time on top of the same conventional programme, so the trial does not isolate the effect of the VR component.
The work was supported by the Qilu Special Fund for Pediatric Discipline Development and a Shandong provincial research and development programme, and the trial is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov as NCT07591896, with Qilu Hospital as lead sponsor.
