Parents of hospitalised children experienced significantly reduced anxiety after using virtual reality meditation programmes, a new study has found.
The research, conducted at Stanford Medicine, showed that a short guided VR meditation lowered parental stress by around 30%, with Spanish-speaking families seeing particularly strong benefits.
The team trialled the intervention at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. “We know parents and other caregivers suffer acute anxiety when caring for their children in the hospital,” said Dr Thomas Caruso, paediatric anaesthesiologist and senior author. “As part of our mission to provide family-centred care, we should address that.”
Published in the Journal of Patient Experience, the study suggests that accessible technology like VR can help hospitals support parents’ mental health needs — even in busy clinical environments.
“We showed that VR is a reasonable alternative — one that can be widely available, quickly scaled and highly effective, not just for English-speaking families but also for those whose first language isn’t English,” said Caruso, a clinical professor of anaesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine.
The six-minute meditation transports users to a tranquil mountain setting, with flowing water, trees and an open sky. Guided narration and soft music lead participants through breathing exercises, gradually shifting the scene to twilight with stars and northern lights. The visuals pulse in rhythm with the breathing cues, helping to embed stress-relief techniques.
The study included 101 parents who used the VR meditation in their preferred language, and 99 parents in a control group who used their usual stress-relief strategies, such as reading, talking to friends, or using their phones. Even after adjusting for initial anxiety levels, those in the VR group reported significantly greater reductions in anxiety.
Lead author Ricardo Jimenez, a medical student, was inspired by his own experience supporting his Spanish-speaking parents in healthcare settings. “There are very limited mental health resources for Spanish-speaking populations,” he said. “We think the effect was larger because there’s a bigger unmet need.”
Some families said the meditation offered their first experience of mindfulness practice. “It would give them a moment to open up with us,” Jimenez said. “It brought a lot of parents to tears.”
The project is part of the Stanford Medicine CHARIOT Program, which explores tech-based approaches to easing pain and stress in paediatric care. The team plans to expand its library of VR mental health tools to include more languages and use cases.
VR headsets are now widely available at Packard Children’s Hospital, with staff trained to help parents use them. Caruso said parents’ enthusiasm was a key driver behind the research. “Quite frequently, while we were engaging with a child, parents would say, ‘Man, I wish we had access to something like this!’” he recalled. “Now they do.”
