Medical Extended Reality (‘MXR’)
Great podcast on Faces of Digital Health last December addressing VR and AR in Healthcare i.e. Medical Extended Reality
MXR per Rafael Grossman – ‘augmented reality where you have an interactive connection with the digital content over the real world for a medical application of some type’ – can be applied in surgery, training and other areas in medicine.
Now seeing Virtual Reality as another medical tool – not just diagnostics; opportunities to immerse yourself in the data more therapeutic uses for VR – impacting surgical procedures. Other applications in mental wellbeing, mental disorders, PTST, Depression, Anxiety
Jennifer Esposito
People now understand difference in VR and AR – and the use cases for both. Lots of use cases now in surgery. Training and education are ‘no-brainers’ – but more complex surgical applications likely to deliver real results.
Aaron Gani (BehaVR)
Great mission: ‘liberate the world from fear and pain’. Focused on VR. Demonstrated power of VR for Exposure (PTST, Anxiety), Movement, Focus with absence of distraction (e.g. mindfulness practice). Global market developing for non pharma therapies.
Thoughts on XR – listening to this podcast
What really caught my attention was: ‘How do we take things that are well understood and demonstrated to be effective in a live analog setting between therapist and patient or maybe have been digitised in a 2D manner. How do we translate to something where we are working in an immersive medium where we can get all the digital benefits of standardisation, repeatability, personalisation, lots of data collection, closed loop of your reaction driving the experience itself while we’re doing an immersive medium where movement in involved and the brain is engaged differently, literally’.
Yes – there are challenges: need mor clinical studies/ research, comparative assessment capabilities across the industry, additional education/ talent e.g. thinking about how to maximise use of 3D. Lots of smart people with no real understanding of why XR is transformative – thought this is probably true for lots of people who have not experienced the online games world.
New technologies are enabling advances in XR – AI and Edge computing. AR brings lots more data – how to integrate with other data and what does this mean?
MXR (VR/AR) is just a new way for medicine to interact with the digital world.
Like this comment ‘2D pane of glass is not the end game’. And if you watch this video on YouTube, to paraphrase the patient: ‘if my world is 3D why should medicine stop at 2D’?.