Kids visiting the Boston Children’s Hospital to undergo endoscopic medical procedures such as colonoscopies will get to see the problems their guts are experiencing using virtual reality (VR) technology. This is important, as GI and many other conditions are typically verbally described by physicians and getting a grasp of what’s really going on, especially for kids, is often difficult. The clinical documentation that’s shared with patients doesn’t help much either.
The hospital partnered with Klick Health, a company based in Toronto, Canada, to introduce the HealthVoyager platform using which patients’ own clinical data is used to create virtual models of their insides. The kids can then use commonly available 3D goggles, that work with smartphones, to tour their own anatomy and understand what needs to be remedied.
The HealthVoyager app is used by kids to personalize their look and get acquainted with their character and through which the virtual tours are taken.
This is all actually part of a study evaluating whether the technology helps in educating patients and their parents, and whether kids end up engaging with the therapies more willingly, among other psychological aspects of receiving care.
Here’s a video presenting the HealthVoyager in which you get to see the type of imagery that the system shows:
Link: HealthVoyager…
Via: Boston Children’s…
