Medical Virtual Reality -- An introduction to BraveMind
Virtual reality is used in many fields of studies and in many places. There are few problems which cannot be solved with a medicine and this is where virtual reality helps to treat the people to get better with their problems. Physical issues with health will have a medication with tables or a treatment but mental illness can only be treated with the help of our own strength for fighting back the illness .This technology has already been used in clinics and hospitals for over 30 years. The prices for a special device for the use of virtual reality in medical field started with $30,000 and could even exceed $300,000. Virtual reality helps in treating one such kind of mental illness that is PTSD which means “post-traumatic stress disorder”.
What is Post traumatic stress disorder?
PTSD is be caused by any life-threatening experience.
The symptoms can be quite different:
Avoiding talking or even thinking about the painful experience. Avoiding places, things or people that are some how connected to these memories.
Unwanted repeated thoughts about the event that caused the disorder.
Repetitive negative thoughts, steady negative emotions.
Aggressive behavior.
PTSD is the sphere of psychology and psychotherapy.
Classical treatment is talking therapy.
Its aim is to return the patient to the painful situation that has caused his disorder. But this couldn’t work in every particular case.
Failures ->
Some patients were not able to relax and immerse their memories.
Sometimes the brain blocked the information connected to the accident. So the patient couldn’t live that situation again.
The success of the therapy was under question. With the technical revolution came the perfect solution for this medical problem. They allow to immerse the situations from the past without the need to strain the mind. It easily lets the patient relax and focus on the treatment of his disorder.
The advantages of using Virtual Reality in psychotherapy are
Reduce the duration of the therapist’s consultations.
Increase the efficiency of such treatment.
The application which helps to treat PTSD is BraveMind.
BRAVEMIND->
Let us understand Bravemind by knowing the answers for these 3 basic questions.
Why? Who? What?
1)Who created this and who is working on it?
It was created at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies and is provided free of charge for its clinical use and research upon documenting clinician expertise in the delivery of Prolonged Exposure Therapy for the treatment of combat-related PTSD.
Research period - The study was initially begun in 2005 and is still in process. Every new update is added to the tool to make it more interesting and easy to use. They update the tool to make it more real time usable and easy to use.
Project Leaders:
Arno Hartholt
Albert Rizzo
2) Why was it created?
Bravemind was developed to address the challenges in normal treatment of PTSD by offering a means by which to overcome the natural avoidance tendency of trauma sufferers.
The potential of using VR for the treatment of PTSD is supported by previous reports in which patients with PTSD, who were unresponsive to previous imaginal Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy treatments, went on to respond successfully to Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET).
3)What it does?
Bravemind allows clinicians to gradually immerse patients into virtual environments representative of their traumatic experiences in a controlled, stepwise fashion. It provides the capability to control multi-sensory emotional stimuli and monitor the intensity of the patients’ stress responses via advanced brain imaging and psychophysiological assessment techniques.
The patients are made to put on the Virtual Reality head mounts and the scene which is disturbing them and causing them to undergo the PTSD is played and they are then allowed to deal with the surroundings in that scene. This way they need to put emotional stress on their brain to recreate the scene as it is already built, all they have to do is to deal with the situation and break the stress and anxity in them. This makes the patients brain to calm down and the next time they imagine those situations may not push them into the high stress level.
This is very similar to playing a game in VR but the game was a real life situation. The main reason for the success of this is it records the points where the user is actually feeling stress to deal with and there could be an analysis on his performance on each attempt he deals with as the data is all recorded and stored.
Advatages ->
interactive - The system acts according to the user interaction with the system and based on him action the system responds.
Multi sensory - Not just eyes but ears and other organs are involved so it can easily felt like the real time situation and
Immersive
Easy to create and tailor to patient needs - The virtual environment can be made as per user needs using the tools to develop applications in VR.
Clinicians can control, document and measure stimuli and patient responses
Offering clinical assessment, treatment and research options that are not available via traditional methods.
Sources