Heart Rate and Breathing Variability for Virtual Reality Game Play

Sedentary lifestyle contributes to a number of adverse health conditions including type II diabetes and cardiometabolic disease. Traditional gameplay using a keyboard and mouse results in a prolonged sedentary time. Recent developments in room scale virtual reality systems enable players to walk around and interact with the virtual world, as well as use gestures for the interaction. While these novel ways of interactions reduce the sedentary gameplay time, their health benefits in terms of elevated heart rates and breathing rates have not been investigated thoroughly in the literature. Towards this end, the aim of this research is to quantify the change in heart rate and breathing rate for individuals engaging in Virtual Reality game play. Using the HTC Vive Virtual Reality equipment [1] for the virtual environment setup, and the Zephyr BioHarness Physiology Monitoring System [2], researchers were able to determine the effect of playing four games in virtual reality on the average heart rate and breathing rate of the participants, compared to the effect observed during play of a traditional computer game. Results obtained from the experiment show significant heart rate variation between virtual reality games (especially in games designed to encourage exertion, the most extreme of which are known as “exergaming”) and a traditional game. There is no clear explanation of the effect of virtual reality games on participants' breathing rate due to extremely limited research conducted into this area, as well as a wide range of breathing patterns observed in participants. Further study is still required into the long-term health benefits of playing games in virtual reality.