Metaverse Health

Archive for the ‘Health Industry’ Category

Dr Suzanne Conboy Hill is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Brighton in the UK. She appeared on Radio National’s Future Tense program this morning, talking about her involvement in a virtual hospital project that I’ve mentioned here previously.

It’s an interview well worth listening to for the passion Dr Conboy Hill shows for the topic and her belief on the opportunities virtual worlds provide around informed consent for medical procedures by those with some form of mental impairment. It’s an area I hadn’t thought about much, but it makes sense that an immersive 3D environment would be an ideal medium to promote understanding of medical procedures in a non-threatening environment.

The key challenge at this stage is giving the level of access to provide those benefits in a more widespread way. Additionally, equipping current students of health sciences with the knowledge to navigate such environments is another challenge in an already crowded curriculum in most circumstances.

The same episode of Future Tense also has a short interview with me on the media hype cycle with virtual worlds, their role in education and the precedents likely to be set by the pending class action against Linden Lab on intellectual property grounds.

The Economist has an interesting article on the use of Second Life in training people around virtual consent. It’s an area where a virtual world has strengths (the ability to recreate a real-world situation) without some of the downfalls (lack of clinical complexity due to technological limitations).

Another aspect that has struck me over the past year is just how strong the UK is in virtual worlds and health. The Imperial College London (where this training exercise is being hosted) is one of the shining lights worldwide, with a number of other UK institutions undertaking research.

As a Registered Nurse with a passion for the use of emerging technologies to improve health, it can sometimes be a little frustrating when things don’t seem to progress as fast as one would like. There’s also the ‘they just don’t get it’ phenomenon amongst some in health leadership and management roles, which can lead to the conclusion that progress is all too slow with new approaches.

A stark contrast to that is occurring this week in Melbourne, Australia, with the HealthBeyond e-health Consumer Day. I was very happy to be invited to attend this event to provide participants with a tour of some key health presences in Second Life in conjunction with what will no doubt be an engaging keynote from Mandy Salomon . It’ll be difficult to choose which health areas in Second Life with so many great options, but I do know the University of Plymouth’s sexual health sim is going to feature.

It’s great to see the Health Informatics Society of Australia taking such a lead, featuring virtual worlds, serious games for health and broader gaming for exercise and stimulation in a get-together of this calibre. I have a feeling there’s going to be some exciting announcements come out of the gathering for the Australian health sector, which I’ll report on in coming weeks.

Via Dusan Writer, here’s an interesting piece on the use of Second Life to train pharmacists in using pharmacy clean rooms.

I’ve had the opportunity to use pharmacy clean rooms myself , and I can see how a virtual walk through can be of use before doing the real thing.

Over the past few days, there’s been quite a bit of buzz around the latest piece created by the talented Draxtor Despres. It reports on discussions held on US Healthcare reform in Second Life that will be looked at by the incoming Obama administration as part of much wider community consultations going on at present.

Watch the report for yourself:

The December Student BMJ has an excellent overview of the growing use of Second Life for medical simulation.

The collaborative and immersive meetings aspects are also covered and although the article is pitched at non-virtual world users, it provides a balanced summary of goings-on to date.

A big thanks to Mal Burns for the heads-up.

On the Linden Lab blog, Pathfinder Linden has written on the successful World AIDS Day initiative in Second Life, run by the Karuna organisation. He’s coined the phrase ‘Ecosystems of Support’ and it’s very fitting for initatives like this.

Over the past six months, there’s been a significant momentum build in regards to health and virtual worlds, and certainly support networks are pivotal within that development. The challenge is convincing the wider circle of health professionals, individuals seeking help or support and their families / friends that virtual worlds offer another option that can make a real difference.

Machinima guru Draxtor Depres has created an excellent piece on the entry of a new health non–profit into Second Life.

In Draxtor’s words:

Faster Cures is a self-described action tank, focused on changing the culture of medical research. They recently entered Second Life, planning to use its potential to the fullest. Draxtor Despres found out what the future holds for patient-doctor relationships and so much more….

Thanks to Caleb Booker for the heads-up

Delivering health messages to the general public is difficult at the best of times. It’s tough to capture the attention of people when talking about health – unless it’s their area of expertise, most people don’t want to be bothered thinking about their health any more than is strictly necessary. Those who are healthy often take that for granted; those with known health problems often don’t want to have to think about having additional problems. Preventative medicine has not achieved high penetration within public view, let alone getting people to take good care of existing illnesses.

All this is true in the atomic world, where conventional means of education and advertisement have existed for decades. How daunting, then, is it to imagine trying to bring these messages to people through a new medium like digital environments? Even large companies with huge budgets and design teams have had difficulty conveying their messages to people through digital environments.

A large part of the solution lies in a statement that far easier said than carried out: use digital environments to their advantage. Designers need to find ways of conveying their ideas to users in a way that is enhanced by the digital environment. There’s too many examples of stark buildings with uncertain purpose, and montages of bits and pieces of information that could be better displayed and searched through using web pages, in existing health installations in digital environments – this money could have been better spent elsewhere.

One of the big advantages to digital environments is that information can be gathered by users interactively. A display that encourages an action to be carried by the user, and that engages the user, increases the likelihood that they will continue to peruse even static parts of your installation. Moderation is key – some interactivity in some displays is good, but too much can be overwhelming, and can detract from purpose. Also, there is nothing wrong with a bit of fun in health education, and a bit of interactivity can lend itself to the light-hearted, but again, there must be a point to it all, or you will quickly lose your audience.

So I had a bit of a think about the type of interactive display that I, as an end user, might find both useful and engaging, and also that I, as a programmer and animator, might have some ability to construct. This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list, or an indication of what I believe is most needed, it is intended to assist health care professionals and designers come up with their own notions as to what they might like to contribute to the building of their own installations.

• A garden full of digital plants that closely resemble the atomic versions, in which each of the plants can be clicked on to elicit information about the properties of the plant. This could be used for dispensing information about herbal and traditional remedies, or could give information about the chemical compounds used in modern-day drugs that are sourced from plant matter.
• A display about interactions between commonly prescribed and common over-the-counter drugs. Bottles or packs of the drugs could be on display, and when a user clicks on a bottle or pack a single dose is “consumed” by their avatar. The user can select two or more different drugs to take. Depending on the possible interactions, the avatar can be animated to demonstrate the effect, or simply given a notecard with information about their condition after taking the drugs.
• The mock-up MRI. The user clicks on the apparatus to have their avatar lie down in place. As the bed moves, the user can rotate their camera view around to a screen displaying slices of a normal human body. As another possibility, give the option to display anomalous data and let the user attempt to find the anomaly, testing via a quiz if that seems interesting or useful.
• The “brain storm” exhibit. A possibly artistic representation of the brain with depictions of electrical activity, allowing the user to select whether to view a demonstration of a normal, epileptic or fibromyalgic brain.
• “Pin the bone on the skeleton” – see if users can put a missing bone back in place in a skeleton.
• Avatars can be animated to walk as though they have a physical impairment, and users can attempt to guess what is causing that gait.
• Self-assessment information. How to test yourself at home for a variety of health problems, potentially with demonstrations if applicable.
• First aid classes. This requires the on-going support of an instructor to deliver the course material. This course could bring people into a health-related region, with more extensive static information available for after-class examination.
• Release skins that avatars can wear with bones, or musculature, or arterial, venous or lymphatic systems textured onto them.
• Bots with even a limited capacity for chat. As long as the bot’s abilities are cited up front, this can be a good way of dispensing pertinent user information without having an actual human being at the keyboard.
• Fill a facility with animated bots so that the user ends up perusing a facility to find the bots and see what they are doing. Bot placement and activity might be suggestive of actual staffing levels at an atomic facility.
• Health-based machinima. Use digital environments to create movies that would be overly costly or difficult to create in the atomic world, and then display them in-world.

One further note on information distributed:

It’s been my experience that the information available in health installations in digital worlds has either been insultingly simplistic (for example, the Second Life Main grid is for adults only, and I have seen plenty of information suited to a younger audience) or overly complicated and dense for members of the public. It would be nice to see more examples of grading of information, dispensed through a notecard system, in which the user can choose which grade to read at, and can choose to upgrade when their knowledge and understanding have increased.

Health education for public consumption is tricky. Digital environments are a fantastic way of reaching new niche markets and consolidating new ones. However, the techniques used in the atomic world cannot be simply transported into the digital – keep those in the atomic, if they are working well there. Find the new things that the digital world can do for you and capitalize on those.

I ran across the following promo this week:

“Stepping into Health” becomes Third in Popular “Stepping into Virtual Worlds” Series

The cost for this day-long conference is $79, and participants may register for the conference at www.steppingintovirtualworlds.org

One of Second Life’s main strengths is as a collaborative meeting / conference platform so it’ll be interesting to see the outcomes of this conference as far as getting the word out about the potential of virtual worlds for health professionals.