22 THE IMPACT OF IMMERSIVE DIGITAL MUSEUM EXPERIENCE MODELS ON PEOPLE WITH DEPRESSION
Authors: Wang Xiaofen , Liao Fuxuan , Han* Lihua , Li Lan , Li Zongfei , Sang Mengmeng 
Published: February 2025

Background

With the increase of social pressure, depression has become a major mental health problem worldwide. With the powerful participation and interactivity of virtual reality technology, immersive digital museums provide patients with depression with a new way of sensory stimulation and cognitive regulation. Due to the high incidence of depression and the current treatment needs, non-drug psychological intervention has become the main direction of depression treatment. However, there are few studies on the impact of immersive digital museum experience mode on patients with depression. Therefore, this study focuses on the immersive digital museum experience and verifies the impact of digital museums on symptom relief and quality of life improvement in patients with depression through experiments.

Methods

The study selected 60 patients who met the diagnostic criteria for depression and randomly divided them into an experimental group and a control group of 30 patients each. Patients in the experimental group participated in an immersive digital museum experience twice a week, which included natural landscape exhibitions, historical and cultural scenes, and interactive displays of artworks. The control group received routine psychological counseling and did not receive digital museum intervention. The study used the Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), the Social Disability Screening Schedule (SDSS), and the Short Form-36 Health Survey (SF-36) to evaluate patients before and after the intervention.

Results

The study compared the SDS assessment results of the two groups of patients and analyzed the SDS scale scores of patients at different stages under the immersive digital museum intervention, as shown in Table 1. As can be seen from Table 1, there was a significant decrease in the SDS scores of the subjects after 12 weeks of intervention, in which the scale scores of the patients decreased to 42.6±3.1 after 12 weeks, but the control group only decreased to 51.7±3.8. There was a statistically significant difference in the comparison of scale scores of the patients of the two groups after 12 weeks (P&lt;0.05). And after 6 weeks of the immersive digital museum experience intervention, there was a more significant improvement in the depression of the depressed patients. This shows that there is a significant improvement in the depression of depressed patients after using the immersive digital museum experience.

Discussion

Research results show that digital museums create a positive and safe psychological environment for patients with depression through visual, auditory and interactive content. The immersive digital museum experience can significantly reduce the negative emotions of patients with depression, thus improving their mental health. The immersive digital museum experience has a significant effect on relieving symptoms and improving the quality of life of patients with depression. At the same time, future research will further explore the therapeutic effects of different museum experience contents on patients with depression.

Funding

No. 2022YFF0902402; No.2024-01; No.22285801Z; No. ZD202121; No. 22375801D.