₆ IMPULS: Virtual Reality Healthcare – Institute of Design & Communication

For this impulse, I started looking for alternate sources on VR/AR topics and ended up encountering a variety of podcasts that have said topics as their main objective.The content of these podcasts varies from reviews of equipment or games, tech insights into the world of VR/AR-glasses, and more. During my research, I stumbled upon a podcast episode of UXPodcast that discussed a very interesting topic that one might not necessarily think about at first when hearing the word “VR” ¬– the hosts of this episode were interviewing an expert on the usage of VR in healthcare, the challenges, possibilities and further developments in this area and how VR could be incredibly valuable in medical care. More specifically, the expert who is a doctoral researcher and organisational developer within the areas of brain computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, social robotics and extended reality, works on developing VR-applications as a medical tool, in this case talking about the usage in psychiatric and palliative care.

One thing that was mentioned in the episode that stuck with me was her approach to VR: she calls it not just an educational tool but rather a tool for empathy. VR can be used for both medical training and treatment strategies and offers the unique possibility to fully recreate a person’s individual condition and make it possible for someone else to experience it, thus making it more relatable for people not suffering from said condition. By, for example, recreating auditory and visual hallucinations of a patient with psychosis, it is possible to share that experience with someone else, thus making them more susceptible to empathize with the patient’s experience. That is something that hasn’t yet been possible before VR, as there was no tool that allowed for this kind of immersion before.

I believe that the possibilities and what is yet to come in terms of making illnesses relatable for others bears so much potential for the future and I am excited to see, what kind of developments there will be. Of course, there are also a lot of challenges when using VR in a medical context, accessibility, data and patient safety being only a few of them. But I think that these are topics that will hopefully be addressed sensitively and cautiously, because I believe that the benefit will be invaluable to health services.