It’s been pretty silent the past couple of years about VR, hasn’t it? Well from an entertainment perspective VR is probably not yet able to substitute every tv. Instead, it has taken over other branches where its currently revolutionizing how doctors save lives and cure diseases. VR in healthcare, is already taking over healthcare with lots of applications still to come. Being able to transport a colleague into your mind or a patient into other worlds is the epitome of the digital revolution. Combining the knowledge of doctors, developers, and graphic designers resulted in healthcare applications that are already showing great results encouraging them to strive for even more niches to enrich with digitality. So, let’s find out which applications are already changing the way doctors interact with patients.
Table of Contents
Stressed waiting or vacation?
Surgeries are scary! Nevertheless, someone is opening and cutting around your body. The good news is, the patient won’t notice anything at all, bringing him into an anesthetic state ensures his body and mind will be calmed down and the surgery can be executed as planned. Yet the hustle is not only going on in the operating room! During the operation, relatives are sweating and probably panicking in the waiting room waiting for hopefully good news. Doctors and nurses experience a hard time calming relative down, using VR, on the other hand, can release the pressure! With its usage, relatives can experience the operation in a simulation before or during the surgery. By doing so they get a grasp of the often so complex medical interventions done to the human body. This ensures the relatives are building trust upon the doctors and get a feeling of what is happening. Furthermore, by using VR in the hospital’s waiting rooms, the relatives can be calmed down with the sheer endless worlds capable of exploring using VR headsets. Touring the beach in Hawaii while waiting for a loved one to return healthy, that’s a no brainer!
Let’s throw away complexity!
Probably every one of us has spent at least a short period of time inside a hospital and we know the hustle. Healthcare is complicated! Doctors are facing a hard time describing a disease or upcoming surgery clearly, they are often using complex, a medical language which of course no one with a medical background will understand. This is causing trouble in the mind of the patient even before the surgery has been planned. Complexity and confusion build up resistance in the patient’s mind, which of course is complicating the whole process. Furthermore, a hospital should be a happy place, people’s lives get saved and a lot of wonders happen inside of that building. Doctors are looking forward to providing every patient with a great experience. The reality is different, due to its complexity and uncertainty, people are scared of hospitals! Using virtual reality in this aspect of healthcare can cut that issue off the corner! Imagine you’re having upcoming knee surgery and instead of bombarding you with technical terms, the doctors just give you VR goggles and let you enjoy the tour through your operation. People without a medical background can’t imagine anything with technical terms, they need visuals to understand what will actually happen in their body and by actually understanding the processes inside their body all of the otherwise upcoming resistance can fade away, leaving a doctor’s trusting patient with a calmed down mind ensuring the best possible outcome and VR uses in medical education.
VR for future medical discoveries
Medical conferences can be described as being the bloodstream of the industry. They get used to exchanging innovations and information throughout doctors. Even though doctors can imagine new principles and novelties through medical language a lot easier than a lay does, they’re also humans with five different senses bringing them a learning experience, sight being one of them. Healthcare can also be revolutionized using VR in this type of niche. By providing every attendant with a pair of VR goggles the speaker can tour his colleagues through the discoveries actually enable them to experience it. Doing so the whole healthcare industry can be impacted and changed positively in the long term by providing doctors with a new experience to learn and expand their knowledge.
Combining virtual and real worlds revolutionizes physical therapy
Virtual reality for physical therapy? Really?
Well, a virtual-reality power-user is someone capable of combining both the real and virtual worlds to create something beautiful. Suddenly handicapped people experience the though truth of physical therapy. It’s expensive, not every day, and way too short maximize rehabilitation possibilities and efficiency. Even though the physicians themselves are pros and know what they’re doing they simply don’t have time to actually be there for a patient 24/7 and often have to cut corners in order to help every patient as good as possible. Virtual reality takes this problem and revolutionizes physical healthcare with its therapy possibilities where patients are independent of strict time tables and can even do their therapy from home. For minor handicaps, a big chunk of the approached therapy can be done by the patient himself from home with all the guidance and information they need in order to do their exercises correctly using nothing but VR. Of course, not every therapy can be simulated and achieved using only VR in healthcare, but a lot of therapy approaches can be amplified with its usage. Furthermore, patients can often be prepared for an upcoming therapy session forehand to optimize its efficiency. Who knows, maybe on your next therapist visit instead of getting weeks full of therapy sessions, the therapist will lend you a pair of VR goggles with your program ready to download and experience.
VR demolishes psychological diseases
Every one of us has had a hard time in their life. Some of us can get over it relatively easy, some of us struggle a lot! At some point visiting a psychologist can be the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Often though, psychologists struggle to get the patient on the right path, frequently the patients aren’t able to open themselves up for psychological therapy due to past traumatic experiences. Using VR for psychological healthcare can be a lifesaver on this one. The capabilities of digital touring are truly endless and depend only on the power of graphic designers and developers. Using that power, the patient can be guided through different worlds and can even experience well structured immersive VR experiences to let go of past experiences or to open his mind for psychological treatments. Letting developers, designers, and psychologists work together can lead to something truly beautiful helping people to finally get over hard to beat psychological diseases.