Virtual Reality (VR) is usually associated with gaming — you put on a headset and step into a virtual world where you can solve puzzles, slay enemies or gain experience. While we were simply floored by how amazing it was to play games in VR, everyone else just shrugged and went back to arguing about politics. While a great medium for playing video games, VR just hasn’t taken off as expected and is now in the “trough of disillusionment“. While VR gaming stalls, commercial applications are looking promising. In the same way that artificial intelligence is being focused on healthcare, many startups are creating virtual universes to change the face of healthcare for many people. Here are15 startups working on applying Virtual Reality in healthcare.
Spanish startup Psious has taken in an undisclosed amount of funding to develop an exposure therapy tool which uses virtual reality. Exposure therapy is a tool used by psychologists to help individuals with fears, phobias, and mental illnesses. Virtual reality is an invaluable tool for patients who receive this treatment because it enables psychologists to create the necessary environments for exposure therapy while maintaining a safe and secure office environment. Additionally, their software allows the therapists to both get a real-time look at what their patient sees and adjust the experience as needed even during a session to ensure the best experience and results.
The VR headset needs to have the highest level of calibration to ensure that any biometric equipment synced with the virtual reality hardware to track patient vital signs provides the most accurate information.
Psious isn’t the only company working in this space. Another company that’s been working on this since 2001 is Virtual Reality Medical Center. Not much is known about who funds this firm, but they offer clinically validated products including Airport and Flight VR, Fear of Heights VR, and Virtual Reality Pain Distraction at multiple locations across the U.S.
Paralysis remains a difficult condition to treat, no matter its source. Physical therapy can only take you so far when the mind sees the body as impossible to heal. In cases like these, virtual reality becomes the perfect tool to trick the mind, for lack of a better term. Founded in 2012, Swiss startup MindMaze has taken in $108.5 million to develop a VR program which instills the idea that the paralyzed portions of the body are still functional. Unfortunately, the program hasn’t received approval from the FDA, so it can’t be used in U.S. hospitals yet, but it is having great success in European hospitals, where it has already seen use. The trick to this program’s success is the zero-latency equipment that transmits images and sound in real time without the delay normally associated with this kind of equipment. Just a few weeks ago, Mindmaze acquired another Swiss startup called GaitUp which uses smart sensors and wearables for motion analysis solutions that rival the accuracy of legacy motion labs.
Founded in 1995, Seattle startup Firsthand Technology has taken in an undisclosed amount of funding to become “the leader in Virtual Reality for healthcare” with an emphasis on VR for pain. The firm helped establish the field of VR pain control and helped build the first VR pain relief application, SnowWorld, which was designed for patients recovering in hospital burn wards, allowing them to explore a world of snowmen and forget about their pain for a little bit. They are now spinning out the pain relief technology as a separate startup called DeepStream VR.
Chronic pain is a big business — nearly 80% of the opioid painkillers produced in the world are prescribed in the United States. Abuse is so rampant these days that they now market a pharmaceutical (on prime-time TV) to help with the constipation that opiod addicts suffer from. Studies have found VR helps to reduce the amount of time that patients spend thinking about their pain by nearly 50%.
