Blinding
Short definition
Blinding is the practice, in a study, of keeping participants, clinicians or assessors unaware of who received the intervention and who received the comparison, so that their expectations do not influence the results.
In plain language
If the person assessing pain knows that the patient used virtual reality, they may, even unintentionally, record it differently. Studies are described as «single-blind» or «double-blind» depending on who is unaware of the allocation. With virtual reality interventions it is practically impossible to hide the intervention from the participants themselves, but the assessors and those analysing the data can be kept unaware of which group each person was in.