Child pedestrian safety training in virtual reality: How quickly do children achieve adult functioning and what individual differences impact learning efficiency?

Introduction: Pedestrian injuries represent a leading cause of child death globally. One prevention strategy is teaching children street-crossing skills. Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a strategy to offer repeated street-crossing practice and overcome ethical barriers of training children in live traffic.

Teaching children pedestrian safety in virtual reality via smartphone: a noninferiority randomized clinical trial.

Objective: To evaluate whether child pedestrian safety training in a smartphone-based virtual reality (VR) environment is not inferior to training in a large, semi-immersive VR environment with demonstrated effectiveness.

Methods: Five hundred 7- and 8-year-old children participated; 479 were randomized to one of two conditions: Learning to cross streets in a smartphone-based VR or learning in a semi-immersive kiosk VR. The systems used identical virtual environments and scenarios.

CITIES: Clinical trials with intercurrent events simulator.

Although clinical trials are often designed with randomization and well-controlled protocols, complications will inevitably arise in the presence of intercurrent events (ICEs) such as treatment discontinuation. These can lead to missing outcome data and possibly confounding causal inference when the missingness is a function of a latent stratification of patients defined by intermediate outcomes. The pharmaceutical industry has been focused on developing new methods that can yield pertinent causal inferences in trials with ICEs.