Advancing Telehealth Through Virtual Reality: Collaborative Partnerships and AI Innovations in Digital Medicine

Project Overview

Digital medical applications, including those in Virtual Reality (VR), are on the rise and range from mental health, to simulation and training, to physical activity and assessment. These applications provide opportunities for new ways of assessing, treating, and interacting with patients, whether they are in the room with the healthcare provider or are hundreds of miles away in rural areas. Creators who develop new medical innovations using VR often are not located in academic medical centers but rather bootstrap their innovative ideas themselves as an entrepreneur with a small business. Although they are innovative, they often lack the research training, clinical collaborators, monetary resources, and patient access to complete the research needed to validate and verify their VR applications. This situation creates multiple barriers to the rapid translation of these digital medicine VR interventions into practice. This project will utilize previously collected data to produce informative and impactful peer-reviewed publications and presentations about the development, research, and utilization of digital medical applications in VR. All products will provide useful evidence for the digital medicine and VR communities who are trying to translate evidence to practice and quickly deploy their solution to positively impact human health.