According to dr. Walter Greenleaf, behavioral neuroscientist and a medical technology developer working at Stanford University, interactive virtual environments significantly reduce pain from as much as 44% during the most painful procedures (ex: burn wound treatment), diverts patient attention away from perceiving and feeling pain, decreases pain-related brain-activity, reduces need for anesthesia, opioid medication.

With the decrease in price, VR is getting mainstream. The technology giants such as Facebook and Samsung are making huge investments, according to Statista, 12.4 million units will be shipped worldwide in 2018, more than 5 times as much in 4 years in 2022.

Listen to a conversation with dr. Walter Greenleaf, Medical Director for AppliedVR at Stanford University. He is considered a leading authority in the medical VR field with over three decades of research and development experience in the field of digital medicine and medical virtual reality technology.

Virtual reality has a long history. Its applications precede pure fun, by today, many therapies for medical purposes have been designed.

Virtual reality has many medical applications, which you can learn about from two experts featured in Facs of digital health podcast. In episode 10 listen to dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo, the Director of Medical Virtual Reality at the Institute for Creative Technologies at University of Southern California, and episode 12 features dr. Walter Greenleaf, the Medical Director for AppliedVR at Stanford University.

Topics: addressed:

How does VR differ from exposure therapy, is it more effective?

What are the dangers of VR use on perception?

How do you treat ADHD or PTSD with VR? 

Will FDA regulate VR treatments? What danger do consumers currently face? 

Big data combined with AI hold a lot of hope on prevention and more effective disease treatments. The current reality though is that large a lot of gathered data is not actionable yet. How far is precision medicine then, today? How does precision medicine based medical care look like?

Tune in episode 9 of Faces of digital health with dr. Subha Madhavan. Dr. Madhavan is the Director of the Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics (ICBI) at the Georgetown University Medical Center in the States. She is active in several national and international research projects, and one of her latest projects is a partnership with the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to develop evidence bases for pharmacogenomics and vaccine safety. 

Samson Williams is an entrepreneur and fintech guru. He has been an epidemiologist for the State of Florida, an Anthrax and WMD expert for DC Dept of Health and currently splits his time between serving on the DC Dept of Health’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), and as the Irish Ambassador for Crowdfunding to the EU and partner at Axes and Eggs, a blockchain and cryptocurrency consultancy based in Washington, DC.

This is a recording of a panel discussion on blockchain in healthcare, which took place at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, during the Future for health conference at SXSW. You will hear about some interesting ongoing blockchain projects such as the CDC attempts to use blockchain in epidemiology or the Austin program using blockchain to track medical records of chronically ill homeless people.

Panelists: 

Michael Dillhyon, Founder of Healthbank

Samson Williams, Partner at Axes & Eggs, Board Member at DC Department of Health

Eugene Borukhovich, Global Head of Digital Health Incubation & Innovation at Bayer