As virtual and augmented reality technologies continue to improve, researchers and entrepreneurs continue to investigate the role these tools may play in healthcare. In an educational session at HIMSS18 in Las Vegas Tuesday, presenters described the technologies’ current roadmap, highlighting persisting roadblocks and novel strategies incorporating other technologies.
After describing the...
Without a medical background, listening to a doctor describe a complex procedure can feel a little bit like listening to a lecture in gibberish. That communication gap is particularly wide between pediatric patients and their doctors, but a new virtual reality technology could help facilitate conversation between doctors and patients.
Boston Children’s Hospital is teaming up with Klick Health to...
Researchers from Microsoft are aiming to transform the world of virtual reality from a primarily visual experience to a tactile and auditory one for people with visual impairments.
“Traditional [VR] mainly focuses on visual feedback, which is not accessible for people with visual impairments,” the authors of a research paper on the technology wrote. “We created Canetroller, a haptic cane...
Virtual reality can help children to manage pain without the use of drugs, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology in October. The study, which used VR during blood drawing at the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, found that using VR significantly reduced acute procedural pain and anxiety in patients compared to using the standard of care.
The study also...
Aging care was a frequent topic among the panels and sessions hosted at last week’s Connected Healthcare Conference in Boston. Amidst conversations on remote care, new technology adoption, and other issues of wellness affecting seniors, speakers argued again and again that thoughtfully designed technologies will increasingly be needed to address a patient group that shows no signs of shrinking.
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5G mobile networks may be years away, but that hasn’t stopped mobile health players from salivating over its potential — and perhaps for good reason. A newly released report from Qualcomm and the University of California, Berkeley suggests that the technology will become a “substantial enabler” of the future’s personalized health care ecosystem, and within healthcare alone will have a sales...
Virtual reality has moved from science fiction to marketable consumer product astonishingly quickly, partly because the incorporation of the smartphone into the technology makes it accessible, if not ubiquitous. It’s looking more and more like those who bet that virtual reality is here to stay, and not a flash-in-the-pan trend, made the smart bet.
But what about in healthcare? Could a...
While strategies ranging from cold turkey to scare tactics and stop-gap solutions like gum abound, smoking remains among the most notoriously difficult habits to kick. That’s why MindCotine, a Redwood City, California-based startup wants to tackle the issue with a novel new technology: virtual reality.
Smoking is more than a physiological need, the Argentina-born cofounders Cristian Waitman,...
Amazon eyes the pharmacy business. CNBC is reporting that Amazon is getting serious about breaking into the pharmacy business, to the point that the company is hiring a business lead to create a strategy. The company has apparently been eyeing the space for a while but has now taken some more concrete moves. As well as hiring a business lead, the company has held at least one annual meeting to...
Swiss neurogaming company MindMaze has received FDA clearance for its MindMotion Pro platform, a motion capture system similar to the Microsoft Kinect which can be used in rehabilitation of stroke and traumatic injury patients.
"In the last few years we’ve launched products at the intersection of the brain and VR," MindMaze CEO Tej Tadi told MobiHealthNews. "What we’ve done today very...
