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Especially after Facebook’s famous acquisition of Oculus VR, you probably associate virtual reality exclusively with video games. But the technology that creates immersive, three-dimensional virtual environments has huge potential not only for the creation of captivating entertainment experiences, but also for changing how fields like medicine have traditionally worked. From head-mounted displays to five-walled environments, and from computer-based solutions to Google Glass, here are five different experiments that have demonstrated how virtual and augmented reality are already changing the way that diseases and chronic conditions are diagnosed and treated.
1. Virtual reality can help diagnose cognitive decline
A new research project at the University of California’s Qualcomm Institute called the VE-HuNT System (Virtual Environment Human Navigation Task) looks to use virtual reality to aid the diagnosis and treatment of memory failure and diseases like dementia. The system is a research project of Eduardo Macagno, a biological sciences professor at the University of California San Diego.
2. Virtually reality improves social cognition in young adults with high-functioning autism
Several studies have used virtual reality as a therapy method for both children and adults with autism spectrum disorders. One study, by Michelle R. Kandalaft, Nyaz Didehbani, Daniel C. Krawczyk, Tandra T. Allen, and Sandra B. Chapman, all researchers at the University of Texas Dallas, focused on using virtual reality social cognition training to help eight young adults with high-functioning autism enhance their social skills, social cognition, and social functioning.
3. Exposure therapy in virtual environments relieves post-traumatic stress
Research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies uses virtual reality exposure therapy to relieve post-traumatic stress. The therapy system, called Bravemind, is based on the concept of exposure therapy, in which a patient confronts and processes his or her trauma memories by retelling the experience to a therapist. Traditional methods of exposure therapy have been endorsed as an effective treatment for post-traumatic stress. The ICT’s Bravemind system takes exposure therapy a step further by leveraging virtual reality to enable patients to experience a scenario again instead of simply relying on their memory as they recount an experience.
4. Augmented reality therapy treats phantom limb pain
Researcher Max Ortiz Catalan, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and colleagues Nichlas Sander, Morten B. Kristoffersen, Bo Hakansson, and Rickard Branemark developed an augmented reality therapy to relieve an amputee’s phantom limb pain. Phantom limb pain is traditionally treated with a variety of different methods, among them mirror therapy. Mirror therapy uses an actual mirror to train the body to reconfigure its mental representation or where each limb of the body is. The body often misrepresents where a limb is when severe injury or the loss of a limb occurs, and experts think these misrepresentations cause pain in “phantom limbs” that are no longer there. The brain remembers the pain in a limb before it was removed, and continues sending the same nerve signals because it thinks that the limb is still there. In mirror therapy, the patients moves both limbs — the one that is still intact and the phantom limb — in coordination to correct the body’s misrepresentations of the limb and pain.
5. Augmented reality improves surgeons’ accuracy
As VentureBeat reported in March, Stanford physician Homero Rivas has experimented with a Google Glass app called MedicAR, developed by Droiders, a European team of mobile developers who specialize in “Glassware,” or apps for Google Glass. The partnership between Rivas, who is Stanford’s director of innovative surgery, and Droiders came out of the interest in wearable tech that Rivas shares with Julian Beltran, Droiders’ chief executive.