Virtual Reality Could Be Your Next Prescription – DesignNews

Hospital inpatients could soon be given a different type of prescription to manage their acute and chronic pain a healthy dose of virtual reality (VR).

Speaking at the Pacific Design and Manufacturing show, Dr. Vartan Tashjian, an internist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and Josh Sackman, president and co-founder of AppliedVR, a Los Angeles-based VR company, talked about their research into the patient care benefits of VR. Their recent work points to the potential of using VR as a viable alternative to drug-based treatments.

A hospital room is not for comfort. They're for suffering, and patients are trapped there, Tashjian told the audience. We thought what a wonderful thing it would be to bring VR to the bedside to take our patients to fantastic destinations.

Tashjian provided some anecdotal evidence in the form of a video of a sickle cell anemia patient, hospitalized for over 100 days, seeming to forget all about his condition when exposed to a VR experience (roaming a photorealistic nature environment). I've been practicing medicine for a couple of years and there's not much that I can do that provides relief to patient that rapidly and that profoundly, Tashjian said of the video.

But Cedars-Sinai and AppliedVRhave also done research to back up these claims. In a study outlined by Tashjian, a group of patients exposed to VR showed a larger reduction in pain, and were more likely to experience a reduction in pain than a control group that was exposed to television for the same amount of time.

The researchers asked patients to report their pain on a scale of one to 10 (10 being the highest). They were then asked to put on a Samsung Gear VR headset and explore a 360-degree animated nature environment for six minutes. The control group watched a natural channel on TV for six minutes.

At the end of the study 40% of the TV group reported a reduction in pain after the experience. By contrast 65% of the VR group reported pain reduction. People watching TV had a reduction in pain, but when you compare that to VR there's no competition, Tashjian said. VR has a very unique style of decreasing someone's pain.

The VR treatment also scored a low number-needed-to-treat (or NNT) of four. The NNT measures the of the impact of a drug or therapy by estimating the number of patients that need to be treated in order for one person to be impacted. For drugs like morphine the NNT is more like 50, Tashjian said.

He added that the experience doesn't have to be limited to computer-generated environments either. Thanks to devices like the Samsung Gear 360 camera, patients can also have real environments streamed to them in VR and even speak remotely with people.

He also cautioned that VR is not a one-size-fits-all solution. VR is not for everyone. Why? Because a lot of people come into the hospital that have headaches, nasea, vomiting, seizures, trauma