In these incredibly trying times, all of us are adapting to new ways of living and working. At RLab, we are thinking a lot about ways to convene and support this community, and we'd love to hear from you. Please fill out a brief survey on event formats and topics that would be most valuable to you. Your feedback will be a huge help as we shape our upcoming programming. Thank you in advance.
This month's newsletter is a showcase for XR's tangible impact during the pandemic - both as a powerful and effective tool for training and education, and as assistive technology for patients isolated in their homes.
Hospitals are upskilling doctors and nurses, and even hiring retired healthcare workers to help fight the pandemic on the frontlines. With exams canceled, medical students can't graduate and get licensed. And patients who need physiotherapy or regularly go to support groups are isolated at home with online alternatives.
Vinay Narayan, VP of platform strategy and developer community at HTC Vive, sees healthcare as the catalyst for the mass adoption for XR. Platforms like Virti and Oxford Medical Simulation are training healthcare workforces at scale (and at safe distances from one another); UCSF uses Vive headsets to teach students how to operate on VR patients, demonstrating the potential of remote, immersive education; and companies like XRHealth are offering support groups in VR. Even the FDA is holding workshops on "Medical Extended Reality."
Please drop us a line at info@rlab.nyc if you have suggestions on articles and topics you would like to see covered in future editions. We wish you well in staying safe and healthy!
Best,
Adaora Udoji
Director of Corporate Innovation, RLab
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Fall 2019 RLab Accelerator graduate Virti (we had a short interview with founder Alex Young back in February) recently received funding as part of NHSX's TechForce19 challenge, and will be used to help scale the company's immersive training efforts. "Healthcare systems globally are finding it incredibly challenging to scale traditional face-to-face training," said Young.
Virti is currently helping upskill healthcare workers with COVID-19 specific training on its XR platform. The company signed up 70k new users over the course of three weeks.
Med-Tech Innovation / 2 min read |
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XRHealth recently raised $7M for its telemedicine platform, bringing total investment to $15M. The platform focuses on rehabilitating patients with back, shoulder, and neck injuries, as well as cognitive training and stress relief (the team has been trying out virtual support groups moderated by physicians.)
"VR has been stigmatized as only being for gaming, one of our challenges is convincing the world that it can be helpful," Orr told TechCrunch. "By the end of the month we'll have more than 500 trained clinicians operating our software."
TechCrunch / 2 min read |
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In HBR's How the Coronavirus Crisis Is Redefining Jobs, the author observes how workers "are doing tasks they never could have imaged a few weeks ago" - shoe manufacturers and automotive giants retooling factors and training staff to make medical equipment from masks to ventilators.
Upskilling is crucial for the doctors and nurses pulled in from unrelated areas to help COVID-19 patients. Some hospitals are turning to VR for scalable training. Cedars-Sinai in LA taught 300 doctors through Virti. Oxford Medical Simulation is another VR medical training platform, focused on preparing healthcare workers for emergency situations.
"We've had an overwhelmingly positive response to the training," said Carol DerSarkissian, a clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, which is using Oxford's platform to train students. "Part of becoming a good doctor is the experience of taking care of similar cases over and over and learning from each one."
(We'll dive deeper into more about Oxford's platform in the Innovation section below.)
CNN / 5 min read |
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London-based digital health company FundamentalVR announced an at-home expansion to their VR education platform, Fundamental Surgery. The education platform now allows medical professionals to train at home with their own headset, in addition to using the HapticVR platform for on-the-job training (see the video below).
"Fundamental Surgery is currently used at medical institutions around the world, including Sana in Germany and University College Hospital London and St George's Hospital in the UK."
MobiHealthNews / 2 min read |
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Oxford VR released a whitepaper on the effectiveness of VR therapy. In VR, the authors write, scenarios are gamified and patients use problem-solving skills to overcome trigger situations. VR therapy also helps reduce drop-out, as users are more likely to be engaged.
The whitepaper gives the example of (Oxford VR co-founder) Daniel Freeman's 2018 paper on using VR for treatment of fear of heights: a virtual coach guided patients over two weeks of increasingly difficult tasks - according to Freeman, the reduction of fear of heights was 68%.
Oxford VR / 14 pages |
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The Oxford Medical Simulation (OMS) is being offered as a free XR training tool for hospitals and schools. Since March 16, 50 institutions have have adopted the platform, or around 17,000 additional medical professionals and students.
To use OMS, users log into a web portal and are presented with a random patient care scenario. While they might go into the simulation knowing a symptom like chest pain, they get little other information. The trainee then has to work out the diagnosis as they would in a real-world scenario. "It's about providing people with clinical experiences on demand," said Dr. Jack Pottle, chief medical officer at OMS.
"Natalya Pasklinsky, the executive director of simulation learning at the Clinical Simulation Learning Center at NYU's Rory Meyers College of Nursing, said the OMS system has been helping students there by strengthening their critical thinking and decision-making skills, while providing useful individualized feedback."
TechRepublic / 7 min read |
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Researchers at the Institute of Digital Healthcare at the University of Warwick conducted a study to see whether people were able to conduct physiotherapy sessions at home with the help of a VR headset and a physiotherapist avatar. The researchers found that "participants struggled to keep in time if only visual information was present." When they added footstep sounds, patients were better able to follow their avatars in exercises.
Dr. Mark Elliott, principal investigator on the project noted that there's "huge potential for consumer VR technologies to be used for both providing guidance to physiotherapy exercises, but also to make the exercises more interesting." |
Health Europa / 2 min read
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Amir Bozorgzadeh, co-founder at health and education startup Virtuleap, said we'll be seeing a "huge boom in VR telehealth solutions in the next year." It's hard to doubt Bozorgzadeh's seeing how VR is steadily becoming a scalable training and therapeutic solution for healthcare professionals and patients.
In an interview, Bozorgzadeh acknowledged that VR telepresence isn't a preferred option for communication. "VR is more suitable for situations where a person wants to blow up cells and molecules and shrink universes." In Bozorgzadeh's view, VR education is more suited to "isolated and short-form experiences," while AR is a more practical medium for collaboration.
Bozorgzadeh also praised IKONA, a VR company that creates educational modules for healthcare workers. The company focuses both on staff training and patient education. |
Via News / 13 min read
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Vinay Narayan, VP of platform strategy and developer community at HTC Vive, sees healthcare as the catalyst for the mass adoption for XR. Healthcare apps for XR "tend to be enterprise-level applications in a 'high-friction' environment," where the technology can streamline operations. One example is UCSF using Vive headsets to teach students how to operate on VR patients.
Other examples include Philips' collaboration with Microsoft on a future AR-enabled OR concept (see video below); the FDA held a public workshop last month on "Medical Extended Reality"; and Seattle-based Proprio is developing an XR platform that guides surgeons through an operation, and allows interns to observe over-the-shoulder. |
GeekWire / 4 min read
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