During rehabilitation, pain management is a major challenge for patients and healthcare professionals. Opioids, drugs that act on the areas of the brain responsible for pain control, are often prescribed in PRM care to help control pain. However, their excessive use can lead to undesirable side effects or addiction. Thus, virtual reality is emerging as an innovative solution to help reduce the use of opioids in adults suffering from chronic and acute pain.
During rehabilitation, pain management is a major challenge for patients and healthcare professionals. Opioids, drugs that act on the areas of the brain responsible for pain control, are often prescribed in PRM care to help control pain. However, their excessive use can lead to undesirable side effects or addiction. Thus, virtual reality is emerging as an innovative solution to help reduce the use of opioids in adults suffering from chronic and acute pain.
Contrary to a video game where we are looking for entertainment, serious games combine a playful dimension with a serious and concrete objective (here: motor and neurological rehabilitation). Present in many fields in order to facilitate learning, serious games are revolutionizing the health sector by being defined as real therapeutic tools with an educational purpose. Indeed, they give the impression of playing, while in reality they make the patients work. They are not perceived as a physical, repetitive and complex activity, and this is what will motivate patients to rehabilitate themselves in a gamified way.
For a few years now, virtual reality has imposed itself in the health field with the objective of facilitating training for health professionals, but also to innovate in terms of rehabilitation techniques for patients. Originally, VR was not intended for the medical field. While virtual reality began to emerge in the 1960s with a first concept of headset, it is in the 1990s that we begin to think about its use in medicine.
Nowadays, many professionals and companies use the terms virtual, augmented and mixed reality, which shows an impressive evolution in technology. However, these three technologies are more or less recent and are often still misunderstood. They tend to be confused and misinterpreted. How to recognize these three terms in order to differentiate them correctly, and thus better understand how they work? Let's discover how imagination and reality mix in the professional world!
Today, the healthcare system is always on the lookout for new technologies to advance research. Virtual reality combines simulation, learning and immersion of the user, while offering a strong interactivity close to reality.
Today, virtual reality is known for immersing video game players in a fictional world, but it also has other benefits. It has been shown that virtual reality can have therapeutic uses by helping patients overcome pain during rehabilitation.
Today, the world of virtual reality continues to develop and offer new features, which allow the user to be immersed in an immersive and imaginary world. The hand tracking is a new technology in virtual reality that gives the possibility of not using controllers linked to the virtual reality helmet, in order to interact only with his hands.
Cyberkinetosis is a pathology similar to motion sickness, caused by overexposure to screens and technology in general. Originally caused by wearing virtual reality headsets, this pathology now extends to any prolonged exposure and isolation associated with screens, tablets, smartphones, video games, headsets and virtual stimulation technologies of all kinds.
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