Healthcare is one of the “hottest” industries, where Virtual Reality is rapidly hitting a place for itself. The concept of Virtual Reality Healthcare utilizes emerging VR technology to allow patients alternative methods to cope with the various types of emotional and physical pain they’re dealing with.
Let’s see a few examples:
Relief of the sensation of pain
Here, our “doctor” prescribes to pick up the app, where you can hide in the huts, which are made of snow or other materials. The environment places the patients in condition where one simply gets pleasure from sightseeing. This effectively helps to calm down and distract the patients from quite unpleasant burning sensations throughout the body. Currently, special healthcare applications are being developed to distract from painful procedures, effectively making it possible to do such procedures without the anesthesia.
One such healthcare application is a video game SnowWorld, from the University of Washington. Despite the fact that all this is in the process of development stage, the numerous clinical results have shown very encouraging results.
Virtual reality and exposure therapy
Professor Albert Rizzo, our director of VR in the medical field who works at the Institute of modern creative technology, uses virtual reality exposure therapy, particularly with soldiers who survived post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by hostilities. The essence of the therapy lies in patient’s immersion in simulation, where he drives the Hammer and suddenly a homemade device explodes in a certain place.
This is a special opportunity for the soldiers to say, especially for those, who survived the war, how it was and how it was awful. This is peculiar stimulation of the imagination, where the patient is trying to work over the trauma or any other problems by a specific provocative method.
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