Changing the reality of healthcare

Remember the game Pokémon Go from way back in 2016? People were going crazy about it and you may have wondered what all the fuss was about. To a lot of people, it may seem like just another way for a mobile game developer to make a profit off of the insatiable need of people to alter their reality with fantasy elements.

Sometimes you might want more than just fantasy elements in reality. Sometimes you want an entirely different reality to have a more immersive experience. You all might have seen or heard of the movie The Matrix. The one where all the characters were transported to a virtual world. Some of you might still think of it as Fiction. Well, the truth is that you now live in a world where there are devices that can simulate a very similar environment if not the same. These computerized devices are called Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) respectively.

According to The Franklin Institution, the Center of Science Education and Research in Philadelphia, AR and VR have seen tremendous development in the past six decades. They have gone far beyond the borders of game plays and have come to possess the potential for real-world applications.

Technology giants such as Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have already come up with their own AR & VR products such as Microsoft HoloLens, Google Glass and Oculus. What’s even more exciting, is that AR & VR applied to healthcare may have many untapped applications. According to a report by Goldman-Sachs, the future of AR and VR may disrupt how patients are monitored in the healthcare industry.

Probably the biggest question you may have is how do AR and VR work in the healthcare industry. The answer is that there are several VR and AR applications examples that can help illustrate the technology’s effectiveness in healthcare. Let us understand the workings and the need for Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality respectively.

So what is Augmented Reality?

It is a type of interactive, reality-based display environment that takes the capabilities of computer generated display, sound, text, and effects to enhance the user’s real-world experience.

So what is the need for Augmented Reality in healthcare?

Augmented Reality devices allow physicians and doctors to utilize data visualization in diagnostic and treatment procedures to improve safety, cost, and efficiency. Traditional imaging methods like ultrasound, CT, and MRI take a significant amount of time to capture and reconstruct medical images. Also, there is a risk of exposing the patients to a high amount of harmful radiations. AR has entered this field of healthcare to help address the above problems.

Brain surgery — Microsoft has become a major contributor to this by introducing Microsoft HoloLens. According to Microsoft, HoloLens is a “fully untethered, see-through holographic computer.” HoloLens allows users to experience 3D holographic images as though they are a part of their environment. This level of immersion enables new forms of computing in which the user’s desktop could be the living room.”

Surgeons are using the HoloLens to project three-dimensional holograms of the patient’s brain while performing a procedure in order to get a better and clearer vision of the details of the brain.

HoloLens has been helping guide surgeons map the brain by allowing a copy of the CT scan to be fed into the HoloLens which can later be used to project the image of the patient’s brain and act as a guide for any kind of brain surgery.

• Blood testing has been made easy by companies like AccuVein, that are making devices to scan a patient’s skin and locates veins, allowing for easier, and less painful insertion of needles. The flagship AccuVein AV400 can digitally display a map of the vasculature on the surface of the skin in real time. This visualization technology increases the likelihood of a successful first stick 3.5 times.

What is Virtual Reality?

It is a computer-generated virtual environment that presents itself to the user in a manner that the user ignores the real environment that she exists in and starts to accept the virtual environment as the real one. The virtual environment is perceived by the user using two out of the five senses: sight and sound. Once you put on a VR headset, it blocks out your worldview and substitutes a digital world instead, that is designed to trick your senses and as a result, your mind perceives you to be somewhere other than your physical location.

VR is now finding a place in the traditional health care systems. It offers a number of applications for the healthcare industry like

• Remote Surgery — Unlike teleconference or video feed, VR has the unique ability to immerse users into a remote setting. Although communications using technology across vast geographical distances have been available for a long in the form of video conferencing. But VR presents a way for people to truly interact with places that are nowhere close to them.

This has proved to be significant in surgeries. With VR, the greatest surgical specialists can treat patients all around the globe, without ever taking a plane. Dr. Mehran Anvari was the first surgeon to perform an operation with the use of a remote-controlled robot at the Centre for Surgical Invention & Innovation (CSii), Although Dr. Ahvari used a standard computer screen, VR offers more efficiency for this type of remote surgery. With the use of a head-mounted display and haptic gloves, a surgeon could virtually transport themselves to an operating room thousands of miles away, and hence be able to use their natural abilities to save lives. It’s just a matter of time before the best surgeons are able to operate all over the world without ever stepping outside their hospital.

• Reducing Chronic Pain — Medical VR has been able to stop the brain from processing pain and reduce pain in hospitalized patients. They help distract the minds of chronic patients, by the use of Virtual Reality, that helps them alleviate pain and release stress. This helps reduce a patient’s stay in the hospital, which results in reduced costs of care. VR devices help distract the patients from the reality of things. The brain is so occupied processing the signals from VR that it has a hard time processing other signals, like pain. This has helped many patients reduce their chronic pain by a quarter. A therapist is only there to record the results and analyze the progress.

AR and VR have seen tremendous growth in the past decade. According to the latest forecasts, the AR device market is expected to reach $659.98 million by the end of 2018, while its counterpart, VR device market is also expected to be worth $407.51 million in the next couple of years.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are increasingly becoming mainstream in the healthcare industry with a lot of hospitals and medical schools adopting the technologies. Renowned universities like the Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine are partnering with the Cleveland Clinic to open their health education campus in 2019. They will be using Virtual Reality instead of cadavers to teach the anatomy of the human body to students. Future medical professionals can analyze the human body and organ-shapes that’ll help them remember the characteristics more vividly than they would if there were to study from a book.

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