Macular Degeneration Disease Awareness Using XR
Authors: Alex Dzyuba, Lucid Reality Labs Founder & CEO
Table of Contents
Immersive technology advancement continues to be amongst the drivers of innovation in the healthcare industry, in many ways, thanks to its capabilities to not only visualize but submerge users into close to real-life experiences. With healthcare divisions, starting from anesthesiology, surgery, gynecology, diagnostic radiology, and even psychology, turning to Extended Reality (XR) to enhance medical practices, procedures, training, and education.
As every aspect of our everyday reality has already been touched by digital transformation, XR can serve as an efficient tool to reshape entire healthcare infrastructures, bringing complete technological ecosystems to institutions, medical specialists, and patients and setting the stage for the next generation of medical care worldwide.
As more high-fidelity XR devices are coming to the market, immersive experiences continue to expand their capabilities through the extension of the field of view (FOV), higher device refresh rates, unprecedented display definitions, and more advanced body, face, hand, and eye-tracking. All these features enable developers to go beyond simple visualization, incorporating digital twin technology to create environments with real-life levels of realism. The latest hardware developments, amongst which are Varjo XR-3, Pico Neo 3 Pro Eye, HTC Vive Focus 3, and Pimax’s 12K QLED VR, will continue opening new opportunities for healthcare XR developers around the world.
These capabilities, without doubt, will continue advancing as XR uncovers a vast scope of new opportunities that digitalization can bring to practitioners, from being able to practice procedures safely and remotely without putting actual patients at risk to serving as more cost-efficient and sustainable solutions. In recent years, immersive technologies have stepped far beyond practice and demonstration use cases. Implementing XR today can serve as a powerful tool in healthcare to grant access, increase understanding, and help raise disease awareness for millions worldwide. XR experiences are a much-needed eye-opener, reshaping one’s knowledge and helping develop empathy.
With many conditions not visible to the naked eye, Extended Reality can help users understand and learn how to live with some symptoms and experience another person’s everyday struggles. The immersiveness of the XR allows one to build empathy by being in the shoes of a person with a particular medical condition. The technology can help raise awareness amongst the general public, bringing attention to diseases that are sometimes overlooked, neglected, and, as a result, underfunded.
Today, we would like to look at some conditions and use cases where utilizing XR can make a significant difference, spreading knowledge, providing better understanding, accelerating disease awareness, helping develop empathy, and raising funds.
XR for Macular Disease Awareness
Macular disease can be named among conditions requiring additional awareness and immediate attention. With people of all ages living in the state, the number of affected by macular disease is expected to grow from 196 million in 2020 to over 288 million globally by 2040. These conditions can take several forms, with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) being one of the most common forms and the most significant cause of sight loss.
Macular disease symptoms come in various forms, from loss of sharpness, blurriness, and visual distortions to difficulty with adaptation to light levels and loss of central vision. Some symptoms may seem minor at first. However, they are vital signs that should not be overlooked. Even though no cure currently exists for AMD, early intervention and treatment may slow down the disease and diminish the severity of vision loss.
Immersive XR experiences, in this case, can be used to educate specialists, potential patients, and even people not closely related to the issue. XR enables us to come closer to understanding the condition, helping demonstrate the impact of macular disease in real time and resonate with the users. While simply recreating symptoms of a specific medical condition can give users an idea of how the situation looks from a first-person perspective, utilizing the XR device’s eye-tracking capabilities can help it have a solid and lasting impact on the users who have submerged into the XR environment.
For this particular use case, several symptoms of macular disease were recreated in XR using visual materials and medical specialists’ insights and feedback to ensure accurate condition representation. Created XR experience allowed users to interact with natural life objects while experiencing various macular disease symptoms such as visual distortions, increased blurriness of printed words, a well-defined blind spot in the field of vision, and many more.
To complete the project goal and create an XR experience that delivers unprecedented immersion into the everyday struggles of a person with a macular disease condition, we selected a device with one of the highest visual fidelity and advanced capabilities, the Varjo XR-3. The inbuilt eye-tracking and see-through capabilities allowed them to develop an experience that overlayed the real-world environment and objects with digitally recreated conditions, making it impossible to avert from the symptoms, which would follow the user’s gaze and remain in front of their eyes, wherever they would look, with utmost precision. This feature, along with the advanced visual fidelity, made a tremendous impact on the XR experience users, leaving them with a lasting impression and, as a result, a better understanding of the condition and its impact on lives.
XR for ADHD Awareness
The number of diagnosed Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) cases has grown substantially in the past two decades, with research showing a growing trend worldwide. Every year, more and more children are being diagnosed with the condition, and it is one of the most common conditions that can continue through adolescence into adulthood. Global research estimates roughly 129 million children have the state, and, on average, about 3,4% carry it over into adulthood.
ADHD symptoms include hyperactivity, impulsivity, issues with paying attention and staying focused, and trouble with staying concentrated that interferes and may lead to falling behind in development or functioning. People with the condition perceive the world more intensely as if the volume of reality has been amplified significantly for all five senses, overwhelmed with the intensity of the surroundings. Even though no cure exists, early diagnostics and treatment may lessen the symptoms and improve the child’s development.
When it comes to diagnosing the condition, there could be a difficulty as the symptoms can be mistakenly taken for other states and ought to be long-lasting to be able to identify ADHD with precision. In addition, a significant lack of understanding and knowledge about ADHD amongst the general public can cause people to ignore the first signs and the gradual development of the condition.
Like with other conditions that cannot be easily comprehended, educating and raising awareness can play an essential role in the way kids and adults with ADHD are perceived. At the same time, social workers, teachers, and caretakers can use it to obtain the necessary social knowledge to help them improve their interaction with kids experiencing ADHD symptoms.
When it comes to ADHD, people need to develop understanding and empathy, much needed to help children learn how to manage the symptoms and overcome everyday challenges. XR can play a significant role in achieving that.
XR technology allows us to recreate and submerge users into a one-to-one realistic scenario depicting an everyday situation where the sensory stimulation of the surroundings is significantly amplified, compared to the perception of a person not affected by ADHD. Placing users into the shoes of someone with the actual symptoms can be the much-needed bridge to building an understanding. Once submerged, the user can have a personal feel of the everyday challenges, making them resonate, thus leaving a more significant impact than written or video communication can deliver.
Like the previous case study, we have created a VR simulation that enables users to experience how a child with ADHD perceives the world from the first-party perspective. The immersive solution allowed to capture and simulate experiences, emotions, and reactions of a third-grade male student diagnosed with ADHD.
The built experience has a distinct beginning and ending, but the classroom experience (i.e., the distractions) would occur at the user’s will. When the user would look around the room, their gaze would trigger the distractions. The experience was developed to raise public awareness through empathy and allowed users to understand better children who have ADHD conditions as well as learn how to help such patients. Immersive technology allows one to deep dive and first-hand experience a fraction of another person’s life challenges.
In Conclusion
We will see more use cases communicated, published, and researched shortly. Today, XR has stopped much closer to becoming the go-to tool to help demonstrate and get the message across through first-hand experience. Undoubtedly, it allows us to shape a more robust understanding, increase recognition, and build empathy within users. Macular diseases and ADHD are among the many conditions that can benefit from utilizing the power of XR, raising awareness, and bringing much-needed attention. XR has excellent potential to enhance many directions, starting with understanding and including research, intervention, and diagnostics.
Discover more about how XR can help enhance healthcare in our portfolio by contacting us.