When you here the phrase “Virtual reality” what's the first thing that pops into your head? The majority of people would say that it’s some kind of a game, but if we say that its about saving lives? Also that the VR could save your life one day?
As is well known the first VR system has appeared at the 1962, when Morton Heilig has presented the first prototype of a vision simulator, called «Sensorama», which placed a person into a virtual reality with the help of short movies engaging multiple senses (sight, sound, smell, and touch). Things have changed since then VR technologies has assumed it’s well-deserved place in modern medicine.
To begin with, the budding surgeons are training in surgery not on the real patients, but within the special simulators, which were developed especially for this purpose. These simulators are high copies of individual parts of the human body, which need to be operated on. Imagine how much medical malpractices are already avoided and will be possible to avoid in the future with the help of this technology?
All of us have heard about the 11th of September tragedy. Progressive American scientists began to treat posttraumatic shock with the help of a virtual reality helmet. It helped the victims of a terrorist act to reconcile with what had happened to them. According to American researchers, the use of virtual reality has reduced the level of depression in the victims by almost 4 times.
There are cases of using the VR technologies for the treatment the dementia among the elderly, for the restoration after stroke, as well as for treating all kinds of phobias, which seems to confirm the idea, that the virtual reality becomes becomes indispensable in the modern medicine development paradigm.
