It looks like any other virtual reality machine hooked up at amusement centres across the country. But this technology has a serious message.

Cancer experts have been using the latest scientific advances to experience the extreme fatigue from which many of their patients regularly suffer.

Doctors have struggled through In My Steps, a virtual reality exercise that takes them through 15 minutes in the life of a cancer patient.

Specialists using the technology wore headsets and were connected to a pedalling mechanism. They had to manoeuvre their way through a virtual house by steering using a special sensor.

While hooked up to the equipment, they had to perform simple tasks, such as putting on the kettle and answering the front door, while experiencing the simulated fatigue.

Extreme anaemia and fatigue affect up to 76 per cent of cancer patients during chemotherapy.

In My Steps is believed to be the only virtual reality equipment of its kind to mirror these symptoms.

The creators behind the machine worked closely with cancer patients during a one-year study to make the experience as realistic as possible.

The technology was demonstrated at the British Cancer Research Meeting at the University of Sussex in Falmer, near Brighton.

It is being featured as part of a national tour to educate medical professionals and remind them cancer-related fatigue is a significant and distressing problem that is often overlooked in the quest to destroy the disease itself.

Dr Peter Harper, the meeting's chairman and a cancer consultant at Guy's Hospital in London, said: "It is a fatigue which is not relieved by sleep. You go to sleep and wake up feeling the same. This technology provides a valuable insight into what that fatigue is like."

Sue Warren, a member of Brighton Breast Cancer Support, which helps women living with breast cancer, welcomed any technology that reminded specialists how debilitating chemotherapy could be.

Sue, who had a mastectomy and chemotherapy after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1997, said: "Doctors put you in chemotherapy programmes to zap the cancerous cells in your body so it's going to be draining.

"For me, the side effects were like having the flu, but 100 times worse.

"Anything that enables the medical profession to understand what patients feel like has to be useful."