Designing Generative Artificial Intelligence Integrated Immersive Virtual Reality Therapeutic Experiences to Support Meaning-centered Grief Therapies for Bereaved Parents

Bereaved parents often struggle to make sense of and find meaning in and after their loss due to the untimely nature of their child’s death. Challenges with finding meaning have been associated with prolonged grief symptoms that can adversely affect grieving parents’ quality of life. Recently, meaning-centered grief interventions that focus on facilitating adaptive meaning-making after loss have shown therapeutic benefits in reducing prolonged grief symptoms in bereaved individuals. However, these interventions are mostly administered in one-on-one, in-person settings, which limits their accessibility to a broader population due to logistical and locational constraints. While existing videoconferencing applications can provide remote bereavement support and deliver grief therapies, they often lack engaging user experiences and features to support high interactivity, guided imagery and mindfulness exercises commonly used in meaning-centered grief therapies. We hypothesize that the immersive and interactive nature of a networked immersive virtual reality (IVR) system, enhanced with custom content creation features from text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (genAI) models, will create a unique and individualized therapeutic experience that supports meaning-centered grief techniques and activities for bereaved parents in a shared virtual world. This work-in-progress paper presents the design concept of the system prototype, preliminary survey results on user acceptance of the technology, and selected user experience scenarios.