The purpose of this research was to further understand the experience of using a customized avatar in a virtual world to practice desired health behaviors. By triangulating the quantitative and qualitative data of 12 amputee participants, we discovered that salient factors of having an amputation had a profound impact on the measure of health outcomes. This in turn masked the measured effect of the virtual self-management intervention on health outcomes. We also learned that our training was not closely enough aligned with the constructs that we measured. We discuss how to address these gaps in future studies including adding serious games to a virtual world environment to facilitate disclosure of and adjustment to the salient factors and to better align the simulations with desired outcomes.

中文翻译：

---

设计一个虚拟世界来反映截肢者生活的真实挑战

这项研究的目的是进一步了解在虚拟世界中使用定制化身来练习所需的健康行为的体验。通过对 12 名截肢者参与者的定量和定性数据进行三角测量，我们发现截肢的显着因素对健康结果的衡量有深远的影响。这反过来掩盖了虚拟自我管理干预对健康结果的测量效果。我们还了解到，我们的培训与我们测量的结构不够紧密。我们讨论了如何在未来的研究中解决这些差距，包括将严肃的游戏添加到虚拟世界环境中，以促进显着因素的披露和调整，并更好地使模拟与预期结果保持一致。