The healthcare industry has been constantly evolving with new technologies and inventions every day. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) can help doctors simulate computerized environments to provide better care to a patient and also train themselves. The ways VR and AR benefit the healthcare industry show potential promises in how to make patients more comfortable. This is because VR medical applications and AR medical applications help the healthcare sector to better understand any illness and provide an efficient cure.
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are almost similar. The difference between them is a thin line of how the platform allows the users to interact with their environment. Virtual reality creates a complete user experience away from the physical world. Virtual reality is platform where computer generates a user experience for the user in a simulated environment. It focuses on visual and auditory senses and sometimes touch.
Augmented reality enhances the experience by adding features or elements to the real world. One of the best examples is Pokémon Go. Augmented reality is an experience that a user experiences by interacting with real world environment and objects that actually exist in the real world. This is possible by computer generated information and focuses on visual, auditory, and touch senses.
Ways In Which AR And VR Benefit The Healthcare Industry
Training physicians and nurses staff with virtual reality
In healthcare industry, training a physician or a surgeon or a nurse always takes a long time. Especially, training tenure depends upon the level of their expertise. Further, training them also requires resources. This again takes time to allocate people to train, schedule time for training which in turn takes a huge amount of money in investment too. Further, as a part of their training, they need to practice using varied resources which again requires a lot of observation and maintenance. These resources include surgical tools or operating machines, and others.
Now, virtual reality enables physicians and surgeons to interact with surgical tools and machines in a simulated environment. Thus, no real resource is used. And, yet the physician or surgeon gets accessibility to practice they need without any worry and undertake a number of practice trials. This makes them experienced too. With new tech, medical industries are able to store the surgery performance of a top surgeon in the virtual reality machine. This stored surgery can be used again by subordinate surgeons to train themselves to successfully carry out complicated surgeries.
Creates an interesting physical landscape
The environment of a hospital stirs up different kinds of emotions within any individual. The job and its surroundings involve stress and pressure. As a physician or surgeon, working long hours may create stress and pressure on them. Virtual reality and augmented reality help to eliminate stress too. For example, this is possible by stimulating a computerized environment of a beach or soothing landscape. Doctors or physicians can use VR headsets or AR devices to generate these environments while a taking a break or nap and this might help them reduce their stress levels.
Virtual reality and augmented reality are used to create environments that soothes the mind of the stressed individual. This is made possible as the environment created by VR and AR might be a garden or a waterfall or an instrumental concert or opera, etc. For instance, imagine the situation where you are waiting in hospital but using VR and AR, you are spending time without friend in a garden or witnessing a waterfall, etc. Psious and Bravemind are two such VR companies that help the healthcare industry.
Healthcare Companies That Incorporated VR And AR Into Their Operations
Locating a vein with AccuVein
One of the major challenges faced by healthcare interns is trying to locate the vein to inject an IV needle or draw blood for test. This is because they are either scared to stick the needle in the wrong place or not able to identify exactly where the vein is. AccuVein is an augmented reality medicine that breaks down this issue.
AccuVein allows the patient’s skin to elevate and locating a vein becomes more easier as the veins start becoming visible. This allows the practicing physician or surgeon to understand the vascular system of the body much better and locate veins quickly. This application has considerably helped a lot of surgeons and healthcare practitioners. They call their application as AccuVein AV400.
Operate confidentially on a spinal system with Augmedics
Surgical operation on spinal system is one of the major challenge-based operations that every surgeon around the world faces. This is because of the minute detailed procedures that is to be followed in a spinal cord operation. Even a small mistake might make the patiently permanently paralyzed or even result in loss of life. This challenge can be overcome by using applications of Augmedics.
Using AR and VR, the spinal cord or spinal system of a patient can be projected above the patient’s body. This is a combination of both the physical world and the digital world making the surgeon look at every detail which lies under the skin of the patient too. The vision of this application is considered to be one of the closest to the vision provided by x-ray on a patient’s body too. This is because, both the applications are the only ones that allow the physicians or surgeons to see the minute details of the physical body of what lies under the skin.
Package of VRHealth
This application provides various games to play, movies to watch and environmental scenarios to live in by using virtual reality. This is made available to patients and their behaviors while using it is stored and used by physician and surgeons to study and better understand the patient. The stored data is used to analyze and track the treatment given to a patient in an efficient way. This allows the healthcare industry to make smarter decisions. Also, it enables predicting illness that may have not yet been found in the history of the patient’s record. This application is the world’s first FDA approved and ISO-certified medical VR healthcare company.
Signing off: The Healthcare industry is evolving
Virtual reality and augmented reality is changing the medicinal industry as we know. VR and AR are perceived to be as a strong pillar for healthcare industry today. Not all physicians and surgeons have accepted this change as some still prefer the traditional methods of operating. But they are starting to realize the possibilities that lie here too. Let us know, what are the other ways do you feel VR and AR can benefit healthcare industry. Good luck to make life better and the world a better place too.