The Parkinson disease could be kept at bay with the help of VR.

VentureBeat dropped a hefty article for the weekend, which has Fran as one of the main characters. She’s a 90-year-old woman with Parkinson disease, but with VR, she can feel like she’s back in her twenties. Donna Z. Davis, Ph.D., the director of the strategic communications program at the University of Oregon, has been working with virtual reality for ten years. „This is not about replacing; it is about augmenting. It’s technological augmentation in a way that provides for them beyond the capabilities of the physical world. So somebody without legs or with Parkinson’s can go dance. Someone who lives in isolation can have a social life,” she says.

You can find her findings here. They indicate that there’s a link between our physical selves and our digital selves, or avatars. (No, we’re not talking about those blue creatures…) What we see our virtual selves do on the screen can have a positive impact on our body in the real world. Here’s where Fran and her daughter, Barbie steps in: as Fran enjoyed navigating the virtual world, she got the confidence to deal with more physically demanding tasks in real life.

Davis is now working on therapeutic applications (Sansar, High Fidelity), which offer immersive, 3D experiences. These have their problems, though: they require verbal communication instead of text chat, which could put those with hearing and speech impediments at a disadvantage. There’s also a hand controller required along with the physical movement to control our avatar in the virtual world, which disadvantages those with debilitating physical conditions. This is what Davis and her partner, Tom Boellstroff would like to fix.

The duo recently visited Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. Here, they met Cody, who has physical challenges via cerebral palsy and a tragic childhood accident. He managed to control his character by putting the controller on his foot for the first time – you can see it in the second video below, which is a teaser for a documentary called Our Digital Selves -, and Cody took the physical movement requirements with joy by being in the virtual space. „Immersive environments can help motivate patients to do painful or difficult physical therapy movements. Make it something that’s fun, make it joyful. How do you create an opportunity that gets people to go beyond themselves in healthy and supportive ways? Using the virtual world for physical therapy can help create that opportunity,” Davis says.

Another study determined that virtual reality can „trick” the brain into believing that an amputee patient is using the lost limb in the virtual environment, which can help with their chronic or „phantom limb” pain that they might suffer from. Thus, patients can ease their pain without using any highly addictive pain medications.

PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) can also be treated with virtual reality – Virtually Better is a company that created Virtual Iraq. It’s a simulation that would recreate the conditions that the Iraq war veterans experienced in the past. Nearly seventy percent (!) of the patients have shown improvements, which is why it has become a standard accepted treatment by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Other VR-based therapies also exist for aerophobia, acrophobia, glossophobia, and substance abuse.

Firsthand developed a platform that helps to manage chronic and acute pain, and its 3D, game-like environment with its bio-feedback sensors can help regulate physical activities (such as breathing) to calm the mind; Mindmaze and VRHealth offer customizable VR physical therapies, and there’s also Limbix and Psious – the last one in the list has a monthly subscription service.

Davis believes that if we consider virtual reality as an ENHANCEMENT (and not replacement) of the real world, then the treatment for the patients with the VR could be even better than before, and virtual reality could also help remove barriers of culture, race, financial status, or gender.

Let’s hope for the best.

Source: VentureBeat