Could virtual reality be good for our health?
Professor of Cognitive Psychology Mark Mon-Williams has previously explained how virtual reality could be bad for our health. But this technology also offers immense opportunities to improve our wellbeing. Here, Professor Mon-Williams highlights how virtual reality could potentially be good for our health.
The problem with computers
Computers are not good for our health. I am writing this on a standard desktop PC and my shoulders are hunched over a keyboard whilst my neck is locked into a position that allows me to monitor the letters appearing on the screen. I know that I will have a sore neck and shoulders by the time I have finished writing this text.
In fact, neck and back pain is ubiquitous among office workers who use computers, and musculoskeletal problems are the major cause of lost working days across the EU and US (recent UK government statistics estimate work-related musculoskeletal disorders account for 41% of all ill-health absences).
There are also good reasons to be concerned about the use of laptops and tablet computers by children. There is a worldwide epidemic of myopia (often called short or near sightedness), with 2.5 billion people expected to be affected across the world by the end of this decade.
It is possible that the sustained use of tablet computers is contributing to the incidence and extent of the myopia crisis occurring in children. The causes of myopia are still unknown but sustained near viewing (especially under stressful situations — such as studying for exams) has been implicated in stimulating the eye to increase its length (the mechanism by which myopia arises in children who had previously had no problems with their eyesight).
The problems created by myopia go beyond the need to wear glasses or contact lenses — it greatly increases the risk of experiencing a range of eye diseases, and these risks grow substantially in older adults.
It follows that children who sit with a tablet laptop pressed 20 centimeters from their face are likely to be increasing their risk of long term visual problems. It is also probable that the poor posture typically adopted when viewing tablet laptops may be causing a range of long term musculoskeletal problems in the younger generation — problems that will have a high cost to the individual and society in the future.
It is clear that we have a situation in which the way we use computers is bad for us. This raises the hope that new technology might improve the situation, with virtual reality potentially offering a vastly improved way for us to interact with computers. The question is how we can reconcile this optimistic viewpoint with the concerns raised by scientists (including our own research group) about the existing inherent problems with virtual reality design?
Could virtual reality provide a solution?
Since the advent of virtual reality there have been concerns about the possibility of creating long term health problems through sustained use. For example, we highlighted the unnatural pressures that virtual reality places on the visual system. This means that the emerging technology has the potential to cause difficulties, and existing incarnations have known design issues. But this is true of almost all new technologies.
It is difficult to believe that any government today would allow cars to be freely introduced to cities (knowing their capacity to cause deaths and pollution). But imagine a scenario where society could harness the advantages of cars while circumventing known problems through careful design and engineering (before the technology had become so ubiquitous that engineers could only play catch up).
This is exactly the state of affairs with regard to virtual reality systems. There is an outstanding opportunity, at this moment in time, to tackle known design issues from the outset by creating a technology that circumvents possible problems, and even encourages healthy lifestyles.
So why might virtual reality offer advantages to health over the way we generally use computers? Many virtual reality systems use headsets to present images, and these headsets contain sophisticated optical systems. This means that it is possible to present visual information as if it were located some distance away, while allowing sufficient resolution so that the user can see the information in detail.
The advantage of this arrangement is that the eyes do not need to sustain a close focus and can relax when looking at the display, allowing virtual reality systems to avoid the visual pressures that are created through close viewing of laptops and tablet computers.
Virtual reality systems also enable people to use more naturalistic movements when interacting with computer generated displays. Humans have not evolved to sit for long periods of time at a desk, staring at a screen whilst hammering away on a keyboard. Indeed, sitting for long periods of time every day is known to be an indicator of early death.
Humans evolved to walk around their environment and use their hands to explore the world in front of them. Virtual reality affords the possibility of grasping and pointing at letters, and physically moving sections of text around a work space in a natural way.
Moreover, these interactions can be done when standing upright and moving around a work space. It follows that the use of this type of virtual reality could greatly improve the musculoskeletal health of the population.
Could virtual reality tackle the obesity crisis?
Decreasing the prevalence of existing problems associated with the way we use computers would be a huge contribution to society. But the possible benefits of virtual reality in health settings go far beyond simply removing existing problems with computers.
Virtual reality offers the possibility to positively tackle the major public health issues of our time — within every society in the world. In high income countries, there is an obesity epidemic and an urgent need to encourage the population to be more active. There have been previous attempts to use computer gaming to encourage physical activity (most notably the Nintendo Wii), but restrictions in the immersive experience limited its impact.
Once children learned that a tennis stroke could be generated through a flick of the wrist, they were less likely to get much exercise while using the Wii. But virtual reality systems offer the prospect of immersive experiences that could encourage more people to enjoy physical exercise. The advent of systems such as Zwift where cyclists can connect their turbo trainers to the computer and race with other cyclists around the world indicate the potential of this approach.
An unprecedented opportunity
In low income countries, virtual reality offers an unprecedented opportunity to improve the training of health practitioners. For example, our colleagues in international public health endeavour to communicate information about antimicrobial resistance and the need to complete a course of antibiotics to health workers in Pakistan.
There are colossal challenges in getting these messages out to a population of 28 million people spread across the Punjab region, in a society with limited access to computers. The ubiquity of mobile phones in this part of the world offers exciting ways of providing education for the public (and health professionals) through the use of simple and inexpensive virtual reality systems such as Google cardboard. These opportunities are being explored by our team of researchers at Leeds.
There are a myriad of other ways that virtual reality systems can be used to improve health and wellbeing, and it seems that novel ideas are emerging on an almost weekly basis. The opportunities to use virtual reality to support surgical training are already being realised.
The School of Dentistry at the University of Leeds has a suite of world leading virtual reality simulators and we have shown that these systems enable students to acquire core dental skills that are hard (and expensive) to teach using conventional methods. Our team has also shown that virtual reality offers a powerful tool that can enable experienced surgeons to ‘warm up’ before they embark on a complex surgical procedure. This reduces risk to the patient and increases surgical success rates.
Virtual reality could also transform the way we provide treatment to people experiencing poor health. In ground-breaking research, our own group uses virtual reality combined with robotic technology to help children with cerebral palsy learn to move their arms.
We have also used this approach to help children with less severe motor problems to improve their handwriting (a core skill that many children fail to master which leads to them strugging in school). Our colleagues in clinical psychology are exploring exciting opportunities to treat mental health problems, including anxiety, depression and phobia using virtual reality.
The potential of virtual reality to improve the health of our population appears to be restricted only by the limit of our imagination and a lack of research around how the potential can be realised. There are issues with the current virtual reality technology but these issues can be well predicted in advance given the scientific knowledge that exists about human physiology and psychology.
The future of virtual reality
There is an incredible opportunity to create systems that avoid the normal, unanticipated side effects of newly introduced technology. This opportunity hinges on the need to consider how we use technology — it is not sufficient to focus on the technology in isolation. A proper consideration of how people interact with technology will allow creative and innovative approaches to improving health.
Virtual reality is the future and this future could lead to improved health and wellbeing across societies. The University of Leeds is determined to make this the new reality.
