Here are some examples below of the incredible capabilities of VR in healthcare, ranging from helping patients deal with chronic pain, training surgeons from brain injuries, helping relieve employee stress, tackling mental health in the most immersive way possible.
Relieving stress during COVID at UMC
During COVID there was a lot of pressure on the healthcare workers. To quickly relax from long and stressful days, VR was used with which the employee entered a relaxing virtual world. 15 minutes daily made it feel like they were on a vacation.
Erasmus Medical Center uses VR for reanimation training
Erasmus MC uses Virtual reality to help doctors to train reanimation after an open heart surgery. The VR simulation indicates the desired rhythm and how long the reanimation should take. In the future they want to expand the simulation to also simulate the heart-lung machine for better training.
New York University allows students to practice operations remotely
Practicing operations is generally difficult. Virtual reality offers the solution to practice as often as you want without negative consequences. The University of New York allows its students to practice from school and home.
So now that you know that it works, time to show all of the areas where you could benefit from it in your organization:
Solution
Quality of life is something people all deserve to have and sometimes are not afforded due to difficulties with mental illness and physical ailments. What makes supporting patients with these issues is a unique nature, everyone feels pain in a different way and experiences things differently. This is one of the issues that face standard practices and solutions. As well as how can you have employees that can deal with all these different issues.
Taking for example post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the idea is the same for mental illness, however the causes are completely different, the background is unique and the feeling it causes is only applicable to the patient themselves.
This makes providing standard therapy with huge complications, like trying to fit a Square in a circle. So how can we create a better solution that deals with everyone’s unique experience? In the quest to find better methods scientists and researchers tested out virtual reality.
The results were revealing, using VR patients could be put in the exact situation that caused the trauma, reliving it and learning to deal with it, accept it and live with it. Think of being able to find solutions like this for the over 200 official mental illnesses?
Solution
Each year the EU close to $617 billion worth of costs are attributed to work-related illness and stress causing absenteeism and a loss of productivity.
Even with this companies continue to focus on being more efficient and effective, but neglect that the easiest way to improve effectiveness is by making your patients and employees happier and less stressed.
So how do you improve your employee’s happiness is the question many organizations ask themselves and one way that is proven to work is through virtual reality.
Usually employees deal with stress by taking time off or stopping work altogether, what if employees could just put a headset on their head and escape from it all? Wouldn’t it be nice to be on the beach in the Mediterranean, listening to the waves crash and the wind blow? Or better yet going for a swim with dolphins, the thing you have been dreaming about for years.
With VR patients and employees can get away from the stress of the real world, they can relax, can reset and come back feeling refreshed all with the click of a button.
(Scientifically proven to work).
"15 minutes of unwinding in virtual nature using VR glasses from VRelax is exactly what works for me then. You move yourself into a relaxing world and unwind. This way you can clear your head for a while and recharge mentally."
Solution
Training surgeons is one of the most challenging activities, because how can one actually get realistic training by using a textbook, a recording, or by trying it on a test dummy without any real-time consequences? How would you like it if the person operating on you had only practiced on a training dummy or without a real feeling situation? We know how we would feel.
So how can you make the training more realistic, pressurized and therefore more accurate?
One way that has been seeing great results is using VR. Using virtual reality and a test dummy surgeons can begin to recreate scenarios and procedures including different pathways depending on the action the surgeon does.
VR headsets now come with built-in hand tracking or alternatively haptic gloves which allow resistance to be added when performing actions in the surgeries. Did we also mention that it provides a much more effective form of learning for students and surgeons learning new techniques?
“It makes me feel like I am dealing with real patients. However, I’m not afraid of making mistakes and this has increased my confidence and practical skills.”
Solution
Quality of life is something people all deserve to have and sometimes are not afforded due to difficulties with mental illness and physical ailments.
What makes supporting patients with these issues is a unique nature, everyone feels pain in a different way and experiences things differently. This is one of the issues that face standard practices and solutions. As well as how can you have employees that can deal with all these unique challenges.
For physical ailments, such as chronic knee pain, most times it is a mental block that makes us fear or feel it, companies like Reducept have been working hard to help people with this pain. The united nations recognize that this software helps patients understand the pain, see how it works, learn to trust and understand the pain is not real.
Through immersive learning, getting users to do activities and showing how the knee is fine, the patient should experience less and less pain over time.
"The quality of life improves and patients experience less pain over a longer term"