New Study Proves VR Reduces Pain in Hospital Patients

Cedars Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles

Today, the largest study to date at Cedars Sinai Hospital of the impact of virtual reality on pain relief was published in the open access scientific research journal PLOS ONE. This study provides the clearest evidence yet that in-hospital therapeutic VR could be an effective treatment for patients in pain.

Here’s a video narrated by Dr. Brennan Spiegel, the director of health research at Cedars Sinai and the lead author of today’s research paper, explaining how VR was used with patients:

The paper (which is freely available to anybody without a subscription to the journal) is titled Virtual reality for management of pain in hospitalized patients: A randomized comparative effectiveness trial, and had as its research objective:

Therapeutic virtual reality (VR) has emerged as an effective, drug-free tool for pain management, but there is a lack of randomized, controlled data evaluating its effectiveness in hospitalized patients. We sought to measure the impact of on-demand VR versus “health and wellness” television programming for pain in hospitalized patients.

Patients were split into two random groups. One group was treated with VR and the other (control) group viewed flat-screen relaxation television programming. The researchers concluded that the VR group reported significantly reduced pain when compared to those just watching TV. Not only that, the study found that virtual reality was the most effective for severe pain (i.e. pain that ranked 7 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10).

Mobi Health News reports:

“There’s been decades of research testing VR in highly controlled environments — university laboratories, the psychology department and so on,” Dr. Brennan Spiegel, director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai and the study’s lead author, told MobiHealthNews. “This study is really letting VR free and seeing what happens. What I mean by that is it’s a pragmatic study where we didn’t want to control every single element of the study, but literally just see [what would happen] if we were to give it to a broad range of people in the hospital with pain; how would it do compared to a control condition already available in the hospital?”

This strength — alongside the substantial size of the patient population, variety of pain types included and direct comparison to an existing multimedia intervention — helps make the clearest case yet for VR’s clinical potential within the hospital, Spiegel continued, and paves the way for live deployments of the technology as part of inpatient care.

“We don’t need more science at this point to justify deploying VR in the hospital or creating virtualist consult services in the hospital. We’ve got enough evidence now, in my opinion, to begin using this in the inpatient environment,” he said. 

Citation: Spiegel B, Fuller G, Lopez M, Dupuy T, Noah B, Howard A, et al. (2019) Virtual reality for management of pain in hospitalized patients: A randomized comparative effectiveness trial. PLoS ONE 14(8): e0219115. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219115

Dream: A Brief Introduction

Another day, another remote workteams VR application! This one is called, simply, Dream:

There’s precious little information about this one on their website, which I always find irritating when I am hunting for information about a software product. According to their Steam page, Dream features:

– Meet with up to 6 people in a Dream Team and collaborate with them in real time. Dream’s custom built engine and stack allow for extremely low latency collaboration while sending data 90 frames per second (as fast as we can from the hardware, with no interpolation needed). The quality and fidelity really makes Dream feel like being in a space with someone else.

– Utilize Dream’s Browser which is based on Chromium and deeply integrated with our platform and UI. We’ve made sure that every bit of Dream can be used entirely in VR, including a first in class VR keyboard that is capable of 30-40 WPM after a bit of getting used to. 

– Federate external accounts like Google Drive and Dropbox to pull content from them directly into Dream. Bring in a PDF or Image, or bring up a video from your YouTube subscriptions or Plex account. The goal is to make bringing in the content you want to share easy and seamless.

Compared to what I’ve seen for other remote workteams VR platforms, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to recommend it, or set it apart from the competition. The avatars look uncanny/creepy, and what’s with the three-fingered hands?!??

Dream is available on the Oculus Store for the Oculus Rift, and via Steam for the Rift, HTC Vive, and Valve Index VR headsets.

vSpatial: A Brief Introduction (Yet Another Remote Workteams VR Platform)

I discovered yet another remote workteams VR platform today (this is my third one today…I am on a roll!). This one is called vSpatial:

(I’ll have to give them credit for some creative use of visuals!)

According to their datasheet, vSpatial offers, among many other features:

• Full integration with Slack workspace. See all your channels and contacts.

• Access all your computer programs in the meeting, easily share them with a click of a button.

• Team members can view others shared content in full or supersized screens.

• Spatial audio in the meeting makes it feel like you are together in a physical room.

They also offer an infinite screen carousel (as shown in the images above):

Multiple-monitor setups are no longer needed with our infinite screen carousel. Open, modify, interact, and view any application from your desktop inside our personal work space. Your room is setup for you automatically with your open applications.

• Organize and order your screens quickly and easily

• Navigate to files additional you need

• Set the views that work best for you

vSpatial is available on the Oculus Store for the Oculus Rift, and via Steam for the Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, and Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets.

If you’re interested, you can follow vSpatial on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Immersed: A Brief Introduction (Yet Another Remote Workteams VR Application, and Why High Fidelity Has Their Work Cut Out for Them)

You know, if High Fidelity expects to break into the remote workteams market with their repositioned social VR platform, they are facing a lot of competition. Just today I stumbled over yet another remote workteams VR product on my Twitter stream, called Immersed:

The tagline in the image reads: “Immersed enables you and others to collaborate by immersing you into the same VR workspace!”. (I had to chuckle at the cartoon man on a tropical beach, merrily multitasking away under a palm tree in his VR headset! Who the hell does that?!??)

Here’s a brief promotional video for Immersed:

UPDATE: this blogpost was automatically cross-posted to my Twitter, where a critic immediately responded to this video, saying:

Vaporware, nobody needs that. If people wanted to share a code screen they can do that already, donning a headset and being an avatar brings little value and help to this in my opinion.

And I must say that I can’t argue with that. (Why would anybody want to wear a VR headset all day while writing software code?)

Immersed supports both the Oculus Go and the Oculus Quest (which makes it somewhat different from other competing products which require a PCVR solution, like the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive):

Here’s their pricing model:

It looks like the company is charging a one-time US$9.99 fee for 2 collaborators, and a US$9.99-per-month fee for up to 7 coworkers.

Here’s a half-hour YouTube video by RaMarcus covering how to set up and use the 14-day free trial of the Elite level of Immersive (including using the product in an interview with the CEO of the company):

So let’s just run down the list of remote teamwork VR applications I have covered so far on this blog (all in varying degrees of market-readiness):

Probably only one or two of these firms are actually making money at this point (Engage seems to be doing well for itself, and Cisco has deep pockets). And that’s just a list of the business-focused platforms. Many other, more general-purpose, social VR platforms on my list of social VR and virtual worlds would also lend themselves quite nicely to corporate use as well.

High Fidelity is going to have to work extra hard to get noticed in an increasingly crowded and competitive marketplace. Let’s hope they have some good marketing people on their team, and a bit of luck on their side. They’re going to need it. This is not like Second Life in 2003, where Philip Rosedale and his team pretty much had the market to themselves. High Fidelity cannot automatically assume that people will flock to them and embrace them; they are going to have to earn corporate customers by making a better, more fully-featured product. They may have found the consumer market hard to break into; they might find the business market even harder still.

UPDATE Aug. 28th: I have been informed that Cisco has pulled the plug on their Cisco Spark project.