5 Ways VR Will Disrupt Our Health in the Future
An expert in the field of medical virtual reality technology gave SXSW attendees a taste of how VR is currently being used in healthcare, and where he sees VR medical technology going in the future.
March 13, 2018
By far one of the most talked about technologies at South by Southwest this year was virtual reality. VR was, well, virtually everywhere at the interactive media portion of the annual conglomerate of conferences in Austin, and a big reason for that was the potential healthcare applications that this technology lends itself to.
Walter Greenleaf, a research neuroscientist and medical product developer at Stanford University is considered an early pioneer in virtual environment technology with more than three decades of experience in the field of medical VR technology. Yes, he assured SXSW attendees this week, medical VR actually existed 30 years ago.
Here are five ways that VR is being used in healthcare today.
1. VR for Pain Distraction
Greenleaf said there has been a lot of research in this area that has shown it is possible to reduce both acute and chronic pain by using virtual reality programs as a distraction, and that patients who have participated in such studies have been able to reduce their independence on narcotics and opioids. He said researchers have been able to validate the effectiveness of this by showing that the parts of the brain that are active in pain reception are modified by using VR as a distraction for pain.
2. VR for Health and Wellness
Greenleaf said VR and AR (augmented reality) technologies offer ways to help clinicians deal with problems for which they've never had very effective solutions for. Weight management, stress management, addiction, medication adherence, cognitive function training, grief counseling, and isolation concerns are just some of the areas of health and wellness that Greenleaf sees VR technologies making an impact.
"One of the big problems that we have as humans to change our behavior is we don't see the results right away, it might take months before we see the results of our decisions and our actions, but with a virtual environment we can see it right away."