Virtual reality (VR) has seen a rise in use by the healthcare industry. From teaching medical students about trauma procedures, to helping tackle the loneliness and isolation of long-term medical care, VR has seen a variety of uses in medicine. Now Samsung are aiming to develop VR system that can help in the field of mental health.
Mental health care is a complex field, with many of the mechanisms surrounding mental health conditions still poorly understood. Working with VR content creator FNI and the Gangnam Severence Hospital in South Korea, Samsung hopes to gain some insight into this area, and make advances in the field of mental health care.
The project will be aimed at developing systems in the areas of cognitive behaviour therapy, suicide prevention and psychological assessment. A combination of the Samsung Gear VR headset, Gear S3 smartwatch, S Health app and AI virtual assistant Bixby will be used to develop diagnosis kits and other physical products and applications. Medical data from the hospital will be used to ‘teach’ the AI about the medical conditions it will encounter.
The three companies are hoping to be able to turn the products into a commercial product that can be rolled out to hospitals, dementia centres and schools at some point in 2018. There are also plans to make the products available to patients for home use at some point.
VRFocus will bring you further information on Samsung’s VR health applications as it becomes available.
via Mint VR