Metaverse Health

Posts Tagged ‘media’

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 past couple of weeks have seen some interesting articles in the mainstream media on virtual environments and health.

The first is in the Jerusalem Post, showing the benefits for the vision impaired. You can view the full article here.

The second appears in Information Week and covers the use of Second Life by Chicago Children’s Memorial Hospital for disaster preparedness and the work done on Virtual Ability island.

I’m noticing a slow but steady trickle of mainstream news reporting on the opportunities of virtual environments and health. The challenge is to ensure there’s really solid evidence to back those claims when they receive more widespread scrutiny.