Hôpital Privé Sévigné, a private hospital in Cesson-Sévigné near Rennes in Brittany, France (part of the Vivalto Santé group), tested virtual reality hypnosis at the bedside of patients shut into protective-isolation rooms in its clinical haematology department.
Patients with severe neutropenia are placed in single filtered-air rooms for weeks at a time to protect them from infection, with strictly limited visiting. Isolation of that kind is repeatedly associated with anxiety, loneliness and low mood, and the ward's existing options — a television, music, reading, psychological support — often do not relieve it.
The intervention used the HYPNO VR device, a class I medical device from the French company HypnoVR consisting of a software application paired with a virtual reality headset (an Oculus Go) and headphones (Bose QuietComfort 35 or equivalent). Nursing staff set up each session and supervised the patient throughout. Before starting, the patient chose a visual environment (beach, wood, space and others), a style of therapeutic background music (ambient, symphony, folk, Asian) and a male or female voice. Each 20-minute session followed a standard hypnosis structure: about three minutes of cardiac coherence breathing to deepen relaxation, a dissociation phase from five minutes with suggestions aimed at comfort and pain relief, then a two-minute 'return' phase bringing the patient out of hypnosis.
The evaluation was a two-arm, parallel-group, single-centre, open-label randomized trial. Sixty adults with a haematological malignancy and neutropenia (neutrophils below 0.5 g/l) who were about to begin protective isolation were randomised 1:1. The 30 patients in the virtual reality hypnosis arm received one 20-minute session per day on three consecutive days; the 30 control patients chose an alternative activity — reading, music or television — for the same length of time each day. State anxiety was measured with the French State-Trait Anxiety Inventory 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after each session, and pain on a 0-10 visual analogue scale.
State anxiety fell further in the hypnosis arm. Taking each patient's last available measurement, the mean change was -6.4 points (SD 9.6) for virtual reality hypnosis against -1.9 points (SD 5.3) for the control activities, a statistically significant difference (p = 0.03). Day by day, the group difference reached significance on the second session day (p = 0.002) but not on the first or third. Pain ratings were low in both arms throughout (means below 2) and did not differ between them, so the sessions did not demonstrate pain relief. Patient satisfaction averaged 7.4 to 7.9 out of 10. Side effects were minor: a few patients reported nausea, one session was stopped early because of vomiting and fever, and one patient had headache and dizziness afterwards.
Dates recorded here are the trial's patient-enrolment window — the first patient was included on 2 July 2021 and the last on 31 January 2024 — not the paper's publication date. The trial is registered as NCT04794608 and under French regulator reference 2020-A02561-38, and the results were published in Supportive Care in Cancer on 24 August 2026. Funding came from the clinical research directorate of Vivalto Santé, the hospital's parent group.
This remains a completed clinical study rather than a confirmed routine service. The authors report that, following the trial, integrating virtual reality hypnosis into the department's supportive care for selected patients in protective isolation "is being considered", and they suggest the approach could later be extended to other high-anxiety situations such as before invasive procedures or during prolonged hospital stays.
