Implementation of virtual reality in healthcare to improve rehabilitation: the developments at Drury University

Written by Anh Vi

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) and other types of extended reality (XR) have become the tools to improve many aspects in healthcare from surgical procedures to patients’ healing processes. The technologies can also create a safe training environment for medical students and help to guide patients through their procedures.

VR can be developed as a medical device for rehabilitation that aids patients to reduce their pain and anxiety post medical procedure. David Beach, Professor and Associate Dean at Hammon School of Architecture (HSA), Drury University sees the potential of VR in changing the impact of confined hospital rooms on patients through the process of distraction. According to Professor Beach, “VR can take you out of the hospital room and put you in an entirely new space.”

The power of designing and transforming spaces with VR is limitless. Recently, Prof. Beach is leading the research of designing spatial experiences for medical VR (med VR) that focus on pediatric patients from the age of 8 to 18 years old. In a med VR project called The Rising Bravery, Prof. Beach and his daughter, Olyvia Beach, design virtual experience based on 4 principles, developed by the think tank of the HSA:

●      Ambient Spatial Intensity: The antithesis of shooting zombies – the goal with ambient intensity is to create and engage curiosity rather than adrenaline fueled intensity. Crafting a place that is familiar, reducing distress, but distant enough to engage a sense of exploration and wonder.

●      Iterative Exploration: Kids should not spend more than around 10-15 minutes in VR as Emotive Displacement can be too powerful and trigger negative side effects. As such, we need to design experiences that are both repetitive (DOITAGAIN!), and iterative – with basic modifications for each experience.

●      Experiential Post Processing: Provided a shorter time span for kids within VR, it is imperative that each game continues into “real space” connecting key aspects of the experience into the analogue world. This increases the overall escapism provided by each experience and builds social opportunities for shared experiences outside of VR.

●      Education Through Immersion: As a relatively new medium, VR is not about replacing existing forms of communication, it is a new modality to express, explore, and inform. As a result, an intentional focus should be made to leverage education within each immersive experience.

Being an institutional partner of Invincikids, the leading organization that distributes immersive technology developed by Stanford University, the HSA at Drury University implements the knowledge of this technology through the architecture program’s electives.

One of the architecture courses that Prof. Beach is teaching includes students’ research of spatial organization and quality of significant buildings and methods of communicating the study through Med VR to pediatric patients.

Prof. Beach stated, “As an educator, I feel like I’m not doing my job if the experiences of med VR and the process of developing the designs don’t have an educational component.”

For more articles, read Drury’s The Mirror!