“But I envision a future where a clinician can pull a stand-alone headset out of their desk drawer, give it to a client, then use their tablet to draw from a cloud library of a thousand different clinical applications and stream it straight to the patient’s headset. “Right now, we have to use tethered headsets because the computational power needed for these scenarios is so great,” he says. With 5G being released in more markets and VR headsets getting lighter, faster and cheaper, Rizzo is one of many doctors who sees tremendous opportunities for this kind of treatment to grow. The implications of 5G on the future of VR care Sixteen out of 20 users no longer meet the criteria for PTSD treatment, and most report an improved quality of life. Patients working with Rizzo saw a 50% decrease in symptoms like anxiety, depression, anger and isolation. Rizzo has found significant statistical differences between veterans who underwent typical PTSD treatment and those who used VR and AI. When a very personable AI bot asks questions that progress from “How are you doing?” to “Are you happy to see your family?” and “How are you sleeping?” veterans are much more likely to open up. “When a squad returns from duty,” Rizzo says, “they have to fill out a medical checklist, and even though they are told it will be confidential, they fear it will follow them through their careers and tend to just say ‘no’ to everything.” But artificial intelligence (AI) is helping clinicians and doctors improve medical care. In recent studies, researchers found that patients were more likely to disclose PTSD symptoms while speaking to a virtual human than to an in-person clinician. One, the repeated exposure to an event has been shown to reduce the “fight or flight” response, and two, feeling safe in a VR environment will allow the subjects to open up in ways that they might not have been able to before. This type of therapy with VR has two purposes, Rizzo says. This moment-by-moment customization of the experience helps each patient go back to a memory that is specific to them. For instance, if the vet was involved in a bombing on the way to a market, the clinician can re-create the experience virtually by pulling from a library of scenarios and then adjusting things like time of day, where the bomb went off, whether a plane flew overhead, whether the veteran was in a vehicle, where they sat in the vehicle, and how many people were present. “We can build out simulations of Iraq and Afghanistan that very closely mimic the situations in which they were traumatized,” Rizzo says. “The best evidence-based approach for treating PTSD,” he says, “is what we call trauma-focused therapy, where the patient imagines their traumatic event in a clinical session with a supportive clinician and narrates their experience.”īy repeatedly confronting and reprocessing these very difficult and emotional memories in a safe environment, the fear and anxiety associated with the memory decrease over time. He and his team started working with veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003. “For children with attention deficit disorder, teenagers with autism, elderly individuals with dementia, and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder,” Rizzo says, VR has been a very effective and safe way to help people. A clinical psychologist and Director of Medical Virtual Reality at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, Rizzo has been developing virtual reality systems to help patients overcome a variety of clinical conditions for over 20 years.
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