LetheVR: A First-Person Serious Game for Empathy and Public Understanding of Dementia

Dementia, one of the leading causes of neurodegenerative mortality in older adults, remains widely misunderstood by the general public—not only stigmatized socially, but also subject to persistent misconceptions about its symptoms, progression, and lived experience. These misunderstandings hinder timely care, empathy, and social support. To address this, we introduce LetheVR, a first-person serious game designed to promote both empathic understanding of individuals living with dementia and cognitive awareness of the disease itself. Targeted at general audiences, the system adopts experiential methods embedded within a game-based structure. Unlike traditional media and static educational tools, LetheVR integrates immersive symptom simulation, narrative-driven gameplay, and guided pedagogical reflection to engage users in the lived experience of dementia. In a controlled study with 60 participants, LetheVR significantly outperformed conventional interventions in improving measured empathy levels and symptom understanding. These findings highlight the potential of Virtual Reality combining with serious games and experiential methods as effective public health interventions for reshaping attitudes and correcting public misunderstandings about dementia.