Virtual Reality is the technology that allows a user to simulate a situation or experience by using a VR headset within a machine-generated environment. The whole enhanced experience is highly immersive and requires special 3D goggles with a screen or gloves to help the user to learn from experience in this virtual world.
Today, Virtual Reality is used in many areas, but here we are going to discuss Virtual Reality in healthcare. In healthcare, virtual reality can be used in interactive medical training, for doctors in training and students, patient treatment, educating people about complex medical conditions, and more.
Quoting figures from last year, the global market for VR will be more than 4 billion dollars by 2020.
Presenting you some best applications of Virtual reality in healthcare:
- Medical training
Today, the current training programs have shifted from the rote memorization of facts. Now, the training program also consists of problem-orientated learning, communication skills, and VR-based real-time learning through glasses.
Any type of medical situation can be simulated using Virtual reality in Medicine; it allows the students to learn in a real-life environment. The technology also increases the scope of feedback and debriefing and allows for the mistake to be corrected. Even faculties are not required to be present to impart learning.
Now, with VR applications, medical professionals can visualize the interior of the human body and can give a detailed vision of inaccessible areas. With the introduction of computer graphics, it is even possible to recreate any part of the body in detail. Even training modules are available with use cases solutions that closely mimic common surgical situations.
Even real-life procedures can be filmed from different angles and it combined with models of the body site being operated on, to allow the student to operate in VR.
- Treatment of patients
Virtual Reality in Healthcare is very significant in handling complex operations, such as neurosurgical procedures. It helps surgeons to make preparations for the surgery and rehearse the whole operation.
This preparation makes the procedure safe and minimizes any surprise. The reconstruction reflects the same feeling as the actual patient in non-virtual surroundings.
VR is also playing a critical role in surgical robotics, which relies on a robotic arm controlled by a human surgeon at a console. Even in mental health issues, VR is playing a tremendous role.
For example, to treat clients with agoraphobia, or acrophobia, a similar situation can be recreated in the therapist’s own center, to help the client face it little by little.
Thus, VR carries the advantages of on-site coaching, with progressive exposure therapy, and reflects the actual sensory experience of the actual situation.
This is complemented with the convenience and privacy of a therapy center in less cost and time.
- Pain management
If you don’t know, Virtual Reality is also useful in the rehabilitation process of patients with acute pain conditions. VR works even more effectively for the patients recovering through skin graft and who have to go through daily cleaning of burn wounds.
Immersive VR can effectively distract and can relieve the pain of such patients, especially when their use of any anesthetic is restricted.
- Physical therapy and rehabilitation
One of the Virtual reality applications in healthcare, as it allows patients to do their exercises at home so it shortens the recovery time. As we have already mentioned that VR plays a very distracting factor and turns the patient’s attention away from the pain. The interactive experiences motivate and encourage them to complete their exercises. As VR also allows them to perform specific movements, it lessens any risk of injuries.
- Addiction
Medical Virtual Reality can also help in recovering from substance abuse. Virtual reality uses the patient’s own environment in the simulated situation and helps patients practice resisting common triggers before exposed to the real thing.
- Health education
Applications of Virtual Reality provide an understandable and detailed reconstruction of the organs and tissues of interest. It helps in identifying the working patterns of the treatment and increases satisfaction with the intervention.
The direct effects of today’s lifestyle practices and noxious substances on the body best reflected by VR, like the growth of some tumors, obesity, and related metabolic dysfunctions, and the impact of smoking and drinking on lungs and liver.
- Fitness
Now, thanks to the revolution in in-app technology, one can witness the role of applications of virtual reality in numerous multiple apps to promote physical activity and make the fitness world fun. These apps are doing physical exercises like a game, provide goals and rewards, give feedback on the movement.
Read our blog on Wearables Continue to Transform the Fitness Industry
A Road to Conclusion
However, we summarize the intervention of VR in medical applications, then we have only achieved 50 % potential. But in the future, VR will increase unprecedentedly to enhance the safety and efficacy of surgical procedures, especially those which are minimally invasive or non-invasive because of the better understanding of the complex intricacies of the human body.
But be aware of using top-notch Virtual reality in Medicine because if poor-quality VR tools are used, the learning may be inferior, and it will be a disaster for surgical procedures.
