Designing and Evaluating an Interactive Asymmetric 360-Degree Telepresence System for Long-Term Hospitalized Patients

Some patients require long-term hospitalization, which restricts their opportunities for social connection and participation in important events or daily lives. To mitigate this issue, we developed an asymmetric 360-degree telepresence system requiring minimal hardware. At the remote site, the user wears a virtual reality head-mounted display to be immersed in the environment. At the local site, a 360-degree camera captures the surroundings, while a humanoid avatar displayed on a rotatable smartphone enables local users to perceive the remote user’s gaze and gestures. In an exploratory, controlled laboratory evaluation (N=16, 8 pairs), remote users reported positive preliminary spatial presence while social presence and non-verbal task completion times showed descriptive variations across visual feedback conditions without statistically significant differences, rather than demonstrating task efficiency gains or statistical equivalence to conventional video calls. Furthermore, in an exploratory single-case fieldwork (N=1), a hospitalized adolescent used our prototype system to remotely view her graduation ceremony. In a post-event subjective questionnaire, the participant reported favorable personal impressions regarding the opportunity and experience to view the ceremony online, although severe cellular network congestion limited smooth video streaming to approximately 20% of the session, and standardized clinical or psychological outcomes were not measured. Overall, this work highlights the potential of lightweight asymmetric telepresence as an initial prototype, while identifying key technical, network, and methodological challenges that must be addressed for future real-world deployment.