Virtual Blood Donation Study

After the subjects completed the questionnaire, we assessed baseline vasovagal reaction levels using the Blood Donation Reactions Inventory and started a baseline thermal imaging recording (T= 2-5 minutes), with the participants at rest. Then, participants were exposed to the experiment; a virtual blood donation. This experiment is a virtual version of the Rubber Arm Illusion and we repeat the experimental setup and stimuli from Trost et al. (2017).

Finally, we asked participants to again rate their VVR responses. Thermal videos were recorded in raw (.sql) format and exported using the FLIR Research IR tool. For each frame, we exported a visual representation and the raw temperature values for post-processing.

For each participant, the start of the virtual blood donation (when the button on the computer screen was pressed and prerecorded videos started playing) was identified. As each prerecorded video file had the same length, we selected 3202 frames for each participant for further analysis. The needle was inserted at frame 1771.