Irish Virtual Reality Creators develop VR solution for Healthcare in Partnership with Oxford University to train health professionals in Kenya

Irish virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) software firm, Immersive VR Education (IVRE), will showcase its latest offering to the virtual reality med-tech market, when it exhibits its ENGAGE Platform at the sold-out Virtual Medicine Conference 2019, to be held at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles on March 27th and 28th.

The VR developers have been working behind the scenes in the med-tech space to develop a VR solution for healthcare training and practice. Two years ago IVRE began a collaboration with Oxford University academics and HTC Vive, to produce a Life-Saving Instruction for Emergencies (LIFE) simulation, which aimed to see how the level of emergency care available for infants can be improved through virtual distance learning.

VR Education CEO and Co-founder, David Whelan,

“The work we have been doing with Oxford on LIFE:VR is incredible. In January 2018, our ENGAGE platform, which is our digital education and corporate training technology providing students, educators and corporate trainers globally with an alternative to expensive, onsite training, was trialled by the LIFE:VR team in hospitals and training universities in Kenya. Through our Oxford partnership, a neo-natal resuscitation module was developed based on ETAT+ training that is already being used to train health workers in developing countries.

The research team, which is returning to Kenya in April of this year, has also begun to explore using low-cost VR for healthcare worker education.

We have developed Life-saving Instruction for Emergencies (LIFE) to allow more health workers access to high-quality training and to overcome the challenge of dispersed medical and nursing training across Kenya. We have developed a mobile and VR platform to teach health workers how to manage medical emergencies – initially to provide training in caring for very sick new-born babies and children. LIFE evolves the scenario-based teaching model that is used in orthodox, face-to-face training approaches, for example, Emergency Triage, Assessment and Treatment plus admission care, and ETAT+ [14, 15]. ETAT+ has already been used to train more than 5,000 healthcare workers and 2,000 medical students across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Myanmar. “

The Stateside Showcase

Developed by the VR clinical research team at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, the Virtual Medicine Conference is a two-day symposium that hosts hundreds of the brightest minds in the field of virtual reality immersive therapeutics from all over the world. VR Education will be on the ground over the two days, to speak with attendees and demonstrate the platform. The VR Education demo will include live training actors performing a medical training event.

Mr. Whelan, speaking ahead of their attendance,

“The Virtual Medicine Conference is a stand-out event in our 2019 calendar. Over the past 2 years, we have been working hard on our ENGAGE platform with a particular focus on how it can be rolled out in the med-tech sector. We will use the Conference as a platform from which we can showcase ENGAGE in front of some of the leading health professionals and tech-innovators in the world.

For years, health tech professionals have been convinced of the benefits of VR in the health space, but until quite recently it has been prohibitively expensive for use in mainstream hospitals and training universities. However, we have developed a VR platform that is both cost-effective and proficient from a practical perspective.

VR can and will increasingly be used in healthcare all around the world – in both developed but also in developing countries. Already we have seen its uses in 3-D imagery such as brain and body scans, and also in simulated surgeries and procedures, pain management, physical therapy, opioid addiction treatment, PTSD treatment, patient well-being, anxiety reduction, exposure therapy, client data management, and first responder training.

Our next challenge is to scale and implement VR into everyday clinical practice.”