• by Elizabeth H. Elfenbein , Columnist, February 14, 2018

If you want to really understand someone’s health circumstance, walk in their shoes through a virtual experience where you can simulate an environment of illness to feel their pain. Virtual reality (VR) continues to advance with the ability to create truly immersive virtual environments (IVE) that can document any kind of situation. VR has been termed “the empathy machine.” So, with that, let’s assume that VR can help you feel what another is feeling, and let’s consider that in the context of health. If we ponder VR’s application in healthcare, the applications are vast. You have the ability to create all kinds of immersive experiences and from multiple customer perspectives. 

Experiencing the patient 

Let’s begin with a patient’s perspective. It’s really hard to understand a patient’s experience with their disease without experiencing it yourself. What does it feel like? VR offers an empathetic journey into a patient’s daily health life and its challenges. Imagine that you’re a patient and that you want a family member to feel what it’s like to live with schizophrenia, so that they can understand how you feel when you hear voices. This is just one example; there are many possibilities where you could help someone in the community to experience the patient’s plight and their health environment. Today, VR allows one to feel a 3-D immersive health experience. Tomorrow, it will be about designing immersive virtual experiences in group settings—in other words, group-level “empathy machines.”

Feel like a caregiver

A caregiver needs to feel support, as they are the ones constantly supporting others. How do we use VR to show the caregiver the empathy that they so need? As we think about designing VR experiences for caregivers, we need to empathize on another level. People need to feel the weight of a caregiver’s day and the binds that tie them to their patients. And while we all know that caregivers are proud and happy to be there to support their patient, it’s still a burden that those who aren’t caregivers can’t quite understand. Perhaps VR could be more universal and help more people who aren’t caregivers feel what caregivers give; perhaps that will help people be more generous in offering different types of support.

Understanding the physician’s challenges

VR offers a unique lens into a physician’s specialty. It’s being used as a platform for teaching medical students surgical techniques and experiences, as well as being shared globally for educational purposes. There are opportunities to design VR games that will help educate medical students in a way that engages and helps them understand what their future as a healthcare professional may look like. And VR is being used for young doctors to experience what it’s like to be elderly. That way they can bridge the age gap and show their elderly patients empathy as caretakers.

VR also offers potential windows into a physician’s challenge, particularly around rare diseases, as it offers a possible way to access an experience that a peer has shared to better understand his or her patients and their illness. 

With virtual reality continuing to evolve, ask yourself, “What are the ways to take the idea of an “empathy machine” to our health customers? And how can we help the healthcare community better understand the health world that we’re living in?” If we can leverage an empathy mindset for all customers, we can design a healthier, more positive holistic health experience.