Posts Tagged phobias
[WEB SITE] Yes! It’s Virtual Reality Demystified – B&T
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in Virtual reality rehabilitation on August 20, 2018
Virtual Reality has been a staple of science fiction for some time, Though, in terms of real-life application, the world is still coming to grips with what the tool can offer us.
In recent years, tech experts, doctors, medical students and videographers have used the tool as a way of exploring worlds not normally accessed in everyday life, and as a medium to advance our knowledge.
To fully grasp the potential of this tool, Facebook head of tech, entertainment and connectivity, Jason Juma-Ross, sat down with industry experts at Advertising Week to discuss how VR has moved beyond far entertainment and is now facilitating positive change globally.
Speaking with Facebook global head of consumer research, Helen Crossley, and Sydney University professor of biomedical sciences, Philip Poronnik, Juma-Ross and the panellists discussed how VR is being harnessed by medical students and marketers in entirely different ways.
For Poronnik, VR is a fundamental piece of learning equipment for his students – a tool he called a “total game changer”. He added, “People have been excited about VR since it came out, however we’ve been limited by cost, but now we have Oculus Go and our abilities are unlimited.”
According to professor Poronnik, the Oculus Go has enabled students to help prep patients for operations, offer better stroke rehabilitation to sufferers and even create bespoke situations where students can train in rare medical emergencies that were previously too costly or niche to study.
“The technology has an immense capacity for training,” said Poronnik. “From the Ebola virus to virtually stepping into Hazmat suits which are incredibly expensive, it allows us to teach students to prep without the cost,” he added.
“We can work on quick drug simulations and stressful situations. Teaching knowledge about these situations is critical but given their low probability, the ability to simulate them with GO has been hugely helpful to students in training.”
Poronnik also touched on how VR sets being used in ER rooms are enabling patients to temporarily disappear, creating virtual environments which distract them from the chaos surrounding them. As well as this, VR has proved very effective in helping and curing phobias.
For Crossley, the tool will be massively important to consumers and retailers. Speaking on the impact of VR, Crossley said, “Consumers want to experience a lot of different things. Immersion will soon be the norm, and it’s interesting to realise most consumers’ first experiences with VR will not be in the home.”
Crossley added, “Physical retailers are successful when they offer a completely immersive experience. Where we see VR with commerce in the future is consumers being able to experience products in a visceral way, be that in travel, auto, retail and beyond.”
Looking to the future, both Poronnik and Crossley agreed we are only at the beginning of finding out what VR can do for humans, though neither could predict what the tech would look like in 10 or even five years. Both, however, are extremely excited about it.
Poronnik, for one, questioned how the tool will physically be used by humans in the coming years given its very nature as a “body experience”. He rhetorically asked, “In the future, will it still be glasses or will it be projected onto our eyes? We’re really just scratching the surface.”
Meanwhile, Crossley likened the technological progress of the tool in marketing to the ‘chicken or the egg’ debate. At the moment both marketers and consumers are waiting to see what the other will do with tool, she said.
Crossley also asked, “How will consumers continue using the tool despite the fact there’s not a tonne of content? How will developers and marketers continue building VR considering the base is still growing? We’re not sure.
“We can only imagine what it’ll be like in 10 years,” Crossley added.
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[WEB SITE] Beyond VR Games – VR Techs Applied to Medical Treatment such Psychotherapy, Mock Surgery
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in Virtual reality rehabilitation on November 26, 2017
Virtual reality (VR) is used in various areas in hospitals such as medical treatment, the education of medical staffs and the enhancement of the convenience and safety of those who visit hospitals.
According to the medical world on November 21, VR is touching various medical fields such as medical education through virtual surgery, virtual rehabilitation treatment and the like. Especially, the field of mental health medicine is garnering much attention and an exposure treatment method which treats various phobias and addictions by using VR is already in a clinical utilization stage.
An exposure therapy is a behavioral therapy that develops emotional tolerance in a deliberate and painful situation for patients suffering from psychological distress that occurs in certain situations. VR is receiving much attention from medical staffs in that it allows precise control over a situation that doctors want to expose patients to. The field to which VR is most actively applied is posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). VR is actively used to treat patients suffering from the avoidance and re-experiencing of traumatic situations such as war or traffic accidents and anxiety about such situations.
Gil Hospital of Gachon University will establish the ‘Virtual Reality Therapy Center’ in January of next year and treat PTSD and panic disorder patients in earnest. In the future, the hospital is planning to expand VR treatment areas to mild cognitive impairment or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “In order to treat PTSD and panic disorder, patients and therapists must go to sites which trigger PTSD and panic disorder or be exposed to stimuli that spark off stress but it is practically or physically impossible,” said professor Cho Seong-jin, a professor of mental health medicine in Gil Hospital. “VR can enable patients to reach a treatment stage by repeatedly giving stimuli in accordance with patients’ conditions.”
Sejong Hospital recently launched a VR application to let patients take a tour of examination rooms, wards, the checkup center and surgery center before visiting the hospital in person. ‘Cancer Hospital VR’ App was released by Samsung Seoul Hospital. The application guides patients about the hospital’s major facilities. VR can help patients reduce their anxiety and stress by taking a look at places where they will be treated and their medical procedures. Bundang Hospital of Seoul National University came up with the results of the application of a VR video for child patients. That is to say, the hospital developed a VR video that allows children close to undergoing surgery to experience surgical procedures with “Pororo” Character popular among kids in a VR world. So the hospital could reduce children’s anxiety before anesthesia 40% in actual surgery.
Gangnam Severance Hospital which has operated a virtual reality clinic since 2005 is developing technology to manage mental health via VR in cooperation with Samsung Electronics. The hospital and the IT giant will jointly develop diagnostic kits and chairs to analyze psychological states with VR devices, a VR mental health program including psychological evaluation, education and training processes, and an artificial intelligence diagnosis system among others with the goal of commercializing them next year.
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[WEB SITE] A New Way for Therapists to Get Inside Heads: Virtual Reality – The New York Times
Posted by Kostas Pantremenos in Virtual reality rehabilitation on August 2, 2017
Myla Fay, a product designer for Limbix, testing the start-up company’s virtual-reality therapy software with a headset in its offices in Palo Alto, Calif. Psychologists can use virtual reality to provide exposure therapy to patients confronting anxiety. Credit: Jason Henry for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — Dawn Jewell recently treated a patient haunted by a car crash. The patient had developed acute anxiety over the cross streets where the crash occurred, unable to drive a route that carried so many painful memories.
So Dr. Jewell, a psychologist in Colorado, treated the patient through a technique called exposure therapy, providing emotional guidance as they revisited the intersection together.
But they did not physically return to the site. They revisited it through virtual reality.
Dr. Jewell is among a handful of psychologists testing a new service from a Silicon Valley start-up called Limbix that offers exposure therapy through Daydream View, the Google headset that works in tandem with a smartphone.
“It provides exposure in a way that patients feel safe,” she said. “We can go to a location together, and the patient can tell me what they’re feeling and what they’re thinking.”
The service recreates outdoor locations by tapping into another Google product, Street View, a vast online database of photos that delivers panoramic scenes of roadways and other locations around the world. Using these virtual street scenes, Dr. Jewell has treated a second patient who struggled with anxiety after being injured by another person outside a local building.
A virtual reality therapy test using Limbix to simulate driving over a bridge. Credit: Limbix
The service is also designed to provide treatment in other ways, like taking patients to the top of a virtual skyscraper so they can face a fear of heights or to a virtual bar so they can address an alcohol addiction.
Backed by the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Limbix is less than a year old. The creators of its new service, including its chief executive and co-founder, Benjamin Lewis, worked in the seminal virtual reality efforts at Google and Facebook.
The hardware and software they are working with is still very young, but Limbix builds on more than two decades of research and clinical trials involving virtual reality and exposure therapy. At a time when much-hyped headsets like the Daydream and Facebook’s Oculus are still struggling to find a wide audience in the world of gaming — let alone other markets — psychology is an area where technology and medical experts believe this technology can be a benefit.
As far back as the mid-1990s, clinical trials showed that this kind of technology could help treat phobias and other conditions, like post-traumatic stress disorder.
Virtual reality cameras at Limbix. The creators of the service worked on virtual reality efforts at Facebook and Google. Credit: Jason Henry for The New York Times
Traditionally, psychologists have treated such conditions by helping patients imagine they are facing a fear, mentally creating a situation where they can address their anxieties. Virtual reality takes this a step further.
“We feel pretty confident that exposure therapy using V.R. can supplement what a patient’s imagination alone can do,” said Skip Rizzo, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California who has explored such technology over the past 20 years.
Barbara Rothbaum helped pioneer the practice at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and her work spawned a company called Virtually Better, which has long offered virtual reality exposure therapy tools to some doctors and hospitals through an older breed of headset. According to one clinical trial she helped build, virtual reality was just as effective as trips to airports in treating the fear of flying, with 90 percent of patients eventually conquering their anxieties.
Such technology has also been effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans. Unlike treatments built solely on imagination, Dr. Rothbaum said, virtual reality can force patients to face their past traumas.
“PTSD is a disorder of avoidance. People don’t want to think about it,” she said. “We need them to be engaged emotionally, and with virtual reality, it’s harder for them to avoid that.”
The founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, demonstrating the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset and Oculus Touch hand controllers in 2015. Credit: Ramin Talaie for The New York Times
Now, headsets like Google’s Daydream, which works in tandem with common smartphones, and Facebook’s Oculus, the self-contained $400 headset that sparked the recent resurgence in virtual reality technologies, could potentially bring this kind of therapy to a much wider audience.
Virtually Better built its technology for virtual reality hardware that sold for several thousands of dollars. Today, Limbix and other companies, including a Spanish start-up called Psious, can offer services that are far less expensive. This week, Limbix is beginning to offer its tools to psychologists and other therapists outside its initial test. The service is free for now, with the company planning to sell more advanced tools at some point.
The Limbix mobile app for virtual-reality therapy. The service is free for now, and the company plans to sell more advanced tools in the future. Credit: Limbix
After testing the Limbix offering, Dr. Jewell said it allowed patients to face their anxieties in more controlled ways than they otherwise could. At the same time, such a tool can truly give patients the feeling that they are being transported to a different locations — at least in some cases.
Standing atop a virtual skyscraper, for instance, can cause anxiety even in those who are relatively comfortable with heights. Experts warn that a service like the one offered by Limbix requires the guiding hand of trained psychologists while still in development.
Limbix combines technical and medical expertise. One key employee, Scott Satkin, is a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher who worked on the Daydream project at Google. Limbix also works with its own psychologist, Sean Sullivan, who continues to run a therapy practice in San Francisco.
Dr. Sullivan is using the new service to treat patients, including a young man who recently developed a fear of flying, something that causes anxiety simply when he talks about it. Using the service alongside Dr. Sullivan, the young man, who asked that his name be withheld for privacy reasons spent several sessions visiting a virtual airport and, eventually, flying on a virtual plane.
In some ways, the young man said, the service is still less than perfect. Like the Street View scenes Dr. Jewell uses in treating her patients, some of this virtual reality is static, built from still images. But like the rest of the virtual reality market, these tools are still evolving toward more realistic scenes.
And even in its current form, the service can be convincing. The young man recently took a flight across the country — here in the real world.
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