Kidney disease has a major impact on global health and is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The main diseases affecting kidney function are diabetes and high blood pressure. People of any age can have chronic kidney disease without symptoms, but it is highly preventable and treatable. The lack of awareness of the disease and, more importantly, the lack of basic kidney knowledge can be a barrier to early intervention. There seems to be a lack of digital interactive and accessible applications to educate the public in this area, with most of the available applications being aimed at healthcare practitioners and patients with long-term illness. Digital technology is widely used due to its flexible geographical transcendence and capacity to communicate complex health information without time constraints. One such technology, Virtual Reality (VR), has been shown to enhance awareness through its immersive experience features, helping to address the lack of understanding of deeper organs of the body that cannot be observed directly.

This chapter presents research which aims to create a VR experience to increase public awareness about diabetic kidney disease, and provide an educational resource about the structure and function of the kidneys. Integrating interactivity and immersive visualisation has the potential to facilitate more active learning and increase user engagement about the diabetic kidney. This research utilises a Computerised Tomography (CT) dataset to digitally reconstruct anatomically accurate kidneys with their internal structures. It uses groundbreaking untethered technology to facilitate an immersive and interactive self-paced learning experience.

Small scale user-testing was conducted with 8 participants to assess the usability of the VR experience, and its effectiveness to support knowledge acquisition of the kidney's structure and function. On the one hand, usability was reported lower than expected but within acceptable margin, which suggested further refinements would be needed to improve the user experience. On the other hand, results were encouraging, suggesting a positive development of knowledge. These experimental results suggest, to a certain extent, that the proposed immersive experience has the potential to support improved public awareness and understanding of the structure and function of the kidney, and related pathology.