Virtual Reality in medical and healthcare industry

Virtual reality technologies are now at the stage of development when various fields of activity began to be seriously interested in them. Health care was no exception. Although VR/AR technologies in the medical world are still minimal, many countries are making significant efforts to develop this area. In this article, we want to show you how vr can impact medicine and. 

Here are some examples of VR in healthcare training:

Expanding opportunities for practical experience in medical education

The hands-on training of medical students and doctors is one of the most problematic areas of the medical education system, given the need to take care of patient safety. A new method of partially solving this problem is the use of modeling systems. For example, the UC Davis School of Medicine’s Virtual Health Center uses dedicated medical VR simulators to educate students in a safe and relaxed environment that allows students to experience different medical situations in a controlled environment.

The use of VR helps to reduce the level of fear of students while at the same time allowing them to gain more experience in a virtual environment. 

Enhanced patient control during surgery

VR has already been used to train surgeons in the past few years, and experience has shown that it can help reduce training times for individual procedures. However, the University Hospital in Angers, France, has gone further and uses virtual reality to map out the brain during surgery. To track the patient’s gaze (and the patient is usually conscious during such operations), the operating team “creates a virtual environment for them with the help of VR glasses without a single focus point.” It allows doctors to control what the patient sees and hears fully and observe the reactions of the patient’s brain to objects in the periphery of vision. This method allows doctors, in particular, to keep the patient’s vision intact for weeks after surgery, in which a tumor that affected the vision in one eye was removed. 

Improved patient education capabilities

It is a big area, from providing timely information for the patient about his diagnosis and medications to informing about what different kinds of tests and procedures are. Some companies, such as Quintiles, a clinical research organization, intend to use VR to recruit patients for their research projects. They give patients a virtual tour of what the research is all about, which allows them to engage patients in study whose goals and methods they better understand.

Using an interactive environment to treat and relieve pain in patients. 

Virtual technologies have great potential for creating relaxation conditions for the patient and are also very useful for treating and recovering patients with PTSD, allowing such patients to heal their emotional state gradually. 

More detailed medical imaging.

Such highly-detailed images allow doctors to understand better the structure of the patient’s organs and his disease. By better understanding the patient’s anatomy, the doctor can better and faster operate, ultimately affecting the patient’s recovery. 

Companies that use VR technology in medicine

Many companies use VR for medicine. One of such organizations is Sensorama Lab. 

What type of VR software is used in medicine?

• We fully delve into the situation that needs to be resolved, anticipate critical situations and create the most natural environment. The simulation is developed under the guidance of medical experts and on actual equipment;
• Sensorama Lab works closely with customers at all stages of production, making the necessary adjustments;
• Detailed reproduction of anatomy;
• We develop scalable solutions for medicine in VR;
• The ability to integrate video conferencing communication for collective learning, demonstration, and discussion of operations performed in virtual reality. 

Our solutions are suitable for:

• Medical students;
• To train hospital staff;
• Surgeons;
• Nurses;
• First aid;
• Therapists;
• Psychologists;
• Patients;
• Clinics.

Wrapping up

In medicine, the field for experiments is limited because a person’s life depends on any action of a doctor. Nevertheless, the advancement of VR companies’ technologiesin medicine can play an essential role in predicting the consequences of medical industry intervention. With three-dimensional information, clinicians can create interactive models of treatment that will help make it more accurate and comfortable for the patient.