Medical

This ScienceDaily article reports food presented in a virtual reality environment causes the same emotional responses as real food. From the article: "Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Annals of General Psychiatry compared the responses of people with anorexia and bulimia, and a control group, to the virtual and real-life snacks, suggesting that virtual food can be used for the evaluation and treatment of eating disorders.

This ScienceDaily article talks about a new "virtual" method to analyze movement patterns in children. From the article: "It was her love of ballet that led her to work with children who have motor disabilities. The retired dancer, now an occupational therapist, is pioneering a new "virtual" method to analyze movement patterns in children ? and more effectively treat those with debilitating motor disorders.

Take a look at this this Science Daily article: "Engineers at Rutgers University have modified a popular home video game system to help teenagers with cerebral palsy improve hand functions. In a pilot trial with three participants, the system improved the teens' abilities to perform a range of daily personal and household activities.

The modified system combined a Sony PlayStation 3 console and a commercial gaming glove with custom-developed software and games to provide exercise routines aimed at improving hand speed and range of finger motion.

From the Washington Post website: "Diane McFarland injected oranges with shots during nursing school until she felt confident enough to prick human subjects. Then she and her classmates took turns on each other.

Nurses at Inova Loudoun Hospital can now practice on SimMan 3G, a life-size patient simulator in a virtual reality lab that opened Monday on the first floor of the Leesburg facility.

From this Science Daily article: "Telemedicine facilitates communication between family physicians, hospitals and nursing services -- yet current solutions lack flexibility and are consequently very expensive. A new software program is now available that can be tailored to a range of applications.

This Vancouver Sun article reports that "A virtual walk in the park may be just what the doctor ordered for chronic pain sufferers. Simon Fraser University associate professor Diane Gromala claims research shows a 3-D stroll in the forest has the power to help people manage chronic pain, sometimes with better results than traditional means such as morphine.

Gromala, head of SFU's Transforming Pain Research Group, is developing a virtual reality technique called "walking meditation." The technique is one of several programs used around the world to aid sufferers of chronic back pain and migraines.

From the Positive Technology Journal website: "The sensitivity of a virtual reality task to planning and prospective memory impairments: Group differences and the efficacy of periodic alerts on performance."

Neuropsychol Rehabil. 2009 Aug 26;:1-25

"Executive functions have been argued to be the most vulnerable to brain injury. In providing an analogue of everyday situations amenable to control and management virtual reality (VR) may offer better insights into planning deficits consequent upon brain injury.

This Virtalis Press Release is in the form of a case study about the use of a pioneering use of VR for radiotherapy training at Birmingham City University. "2008 saw the national roll out by the Department of Health of a revolutionary approach to radiotherapy training. Called VERT, and drawing on Virtual Reality (VR) technology from Virtalis, it has been successfully installed in 10 universities and dozens of cancer centres all over England. Birmingham City University was a development partner on VERT and one of the first to have the system installed and is now putting the System to far more varied uses than it originally anticipated.

From this Wired Science article: " New pilots train on flight simulators before flying their first 757. Scientists experiment on animals before giving their new drug to patients. And fledgling surgeons perform their first few operations on… real people.

Now, a small but growing group of doctors are trying to make surgical training safer by bringing virtual reality into the operating room, and taking the trial-by-error out.

This Press Release talks about the use of VR in a new research initiative at De Montfort University.

"IN RECENT years, significant resources and research activities worldwide have been invested in the creation of Virtual Reality (VR) environments to train specialised skills for surgeons. Virtalis was one of the first, creating a trainer for minimally invasive therapy. Now, a research team from De Montfort University has begun work on assessing the feasibility for a whole team VR surgical trainer with Virtalis both supplying and designing the VR research platform.