#18: Healthcare x VR
Ushering in a new vision of healthcare.
The Apple Vision Pro, first unveiled during a keynote address last year, is officially here.
We’ve all seen this picture: a man wearing the new device on the subway. The original video, garnering 50m+ views in under 24 hours, made waves over social media—like most new Apple products do.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has called the headset the “second most impressive piece of technology since the iPhone”.
Notably, Apple refrains from using the actual term “headset”—instead touting the Vision Pro as “the first spatial computing device”.
Hospitals x Apple Vision Pro
Apple’s attempt to revolutionize healthcare goes beyond the Apple Watch. The Vision Pro is set to make its mark on healthcare, having already been adopted in three major health systems.
Sharp Healthcare
On the heels of the Vision Pro release, San Diego hospital system Sharp Healthcare just launched its Spatial Computing Center of Excellence. The new initiative is in collaboration with Epic—the largest EHR provider in the US—and will explore the use of Apple’s new technology in a healthcare setting.
Specifically, the center invested $105k in 30 headsets and aims to integrate patient medical records, vitals, graphs, and images into a unified display to enhance provider insight.
Cedars-Sinai
Physicians at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center have developed Xaia, a mental health app that allows patients to receive virtual therapy through the Apple Vision Pro. Users can speak to generative AI that emulates a human therapist within an immersive reality. Xaia is trained on transcripts from conversations between real psychologists and their patients.
Last month, a Nature study proved the acceptability, efficacy, and safety of AI psychotherapy via virtual reality.
Boston Children’s Hospital
The CyranoHealth app, designed specifically for Apple’s mixed-reality device, enables providers to practice using medical equipment in a safe and low-stakes environment. Users can also simulate the chaos of a pediatric hospital to practice operating under high amounts of pressure. CyranoHealth has the potential to improve treatments and health outcomes while reducing clinical burnout.
VR in Healthcare: Not a New Concept
With 8 outward- and 4 inward-facing cameras tracking eye movements, the Apple Vision Pro seems poised to transform the field of ophthalmology. Extended reality can make vision screenings more common, helping to prevent further vision loss from chronic conditions such as glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration.
Virtual reality in healthcare, however, isn’t completely new. There were already plenty of use cases—from training medical residents to treating PTSD—long before Apple’s latest product:
Medical Education
Interactive 3D models of human anatomy for medical students.
Improve provider empathy through simulating health conditions such as dementia, Parkinson's, migraines, and other age-related problems.
Improved Diagnosis
Track users’ facial expressions and pupil dilation to identify mental health conditions such as PTSD, anxiety, and stress.
Facial analysis and eye tracking can also pick up on conditions such as vertigo, and predict early signs of stroke and dementia.
Enables remote monitoring of illness and chronic conditions.
Surgery
Surgeons who received virtual reality training improved surgical performance by 230% compared with traditional methods.
Medical Realities recently raised $500k for their VR-enabled surgical coaching platform.
Physical Therapy
Enhance physical therapy through motion-enabled games.
Rehab motor function in children with cerebral palsy.
MindMaze: hospital-based solution for early motor rehabilitation post-stroke
With these benefits in mind, major academic health systems have deployed their own virtual reality solutions:
George Washington University: Precision virtual reality for neurosurgery and thoracic surgery.
UConn Health: Augmented reality spine surgery training for orthopedic residents
Cedars-Sinai: Researcher and co-founder of Xaia, Brennan Spiegel, previously showed VR reduces feelings of pain by 24% for women in labor and sick and injured children, removing the need for pharmaceutical therapies.
University of Washington: Burn patients reported significantly less pain when distracted with VR.
The American College of Cardiology and surgical training platform Osso VR are also set to unveil a new collaboration this April.
Fitness and Wellness
Outside the four walls of a doctor’s office or hospital, virtual reality has already made its mark on fitness and wellness.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta acquired Oculus in 2014, believing that the future of wellbeing lies in the world of mixed reality. Nearly a decade later, Meta completed the acquisition of Within, the maker of VR fitness studio Supernatural. Also available on the Meta Quest headset is Litesport, a virtual boxing and strength boot camp.
Virtual reality has also found a home in senior living facilities:
MyndVR uses immersive technologies to improve the quality of life for older adults.
Rendever connects elders to family and friends while reducing cognitive decline.
Viva Vita provides an all-in-one mental wellness solution for senior communities.
Reality Check
Despite its potential, wide-scale adoption of virtual reality in healthcare faces some serious barriers. Steep prices, data privacy, and lack of clinical evidence all remain a concern for hospitals considering usage. The physical weight of the device, though only about 1.5 lbs, may also contribute to posture issues.
There is also the risk of VR addiction, though research shows comparable compulsive use of VR technology versus non-VR video games.
Future Vision
The jury is still out on whether virtual reality technology is more effective than existing solutions in healthcare. Nonetheless, 1 in 10 hospitals and 1 in 8 medical education providers will be using the technology by 2028.
VR, when combined with other forms of treatment can enable comprehensive and patient-centric care. As is the case with RealizedCare:
Oct 2021: Behavioral health platform BehaVR partners with Sumitomo Pharma to develop virtual reality therapies for depression and anxiety.
Dec 2022: BehaVR and Oxford University-spun OxfordVR raise $13m to support a merger.
Nov 2023: BehaVR combines with virtual chronic-care management company Fern Health to form RealizedCare, offering wraparound virtual services including VR interventions, an AI assistant, and personal health coaching.
A mixed reality future seems near. But, until Apple creates smaller versions of the Vision Pro and sells them at a lower price point, it’ll be years before VR is largely adopted in healthcare.
As for society in general, it’ll also be a while before sporting VR headsets on public transportation becomes the new norm.
This week in healthcare:
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Climate Change Has Hit Home Insurance. Is Health Insurance Next?, WSJ
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Such an interesting situation. Thanks for sharing🙌🏼