Technologies that were hardly used ten years ago, such as the Internet, e-mail, and video teleconferencing are becoming familiar methods for diagnosis, therapy, education and training. However, the possible impact of virtual reality (VR) on health care is even higher than the one offered by the new communication technologies. In fact, VR is a technology, a communication interface and an experience: a communication interface based on interactive 3D visualization, able to collect and integrate in single real-like experience different inputs and data sets. The first health care applications of VR started in the early ‘90s with the need for medical staff to visualize complex medical data, particularly during surgery and for surgery planning. A couple of years later, the scope of VR applications in medicine has broadened to include neuropsychological assessment and rehabilitation. This paper intends to investigate the role of VR in medicine, presenting some of the most interesting applications actually developed in the area. Moreover, it discusses the clinical principles, technological devices and safety issues associated with the use of virtual reality in medicine.

Virtual reality (VR) has recently emerged as a potentially effective way to provide general and specialty health care services, and appears poised to enter mainstream psychotherapy delivery. Because VR could be part of the future of clinical psychology, it is critical to all psychotherapists that it be defined broadly. To ensure appropriate development of VR applications, clinicians must have a clear understanding of the opportunities and challenges it will provide in professional practice. This review outlines the current state of clinical research relevant to the development of virtual environments for use in psychotherapy. In particular, the paper focuses its analysis on both actual applications of VR in clinical psychology and how different clinical perspectives can use this approach to improve the process of therapeutic change.

This report surveys the state of the art in applications of virtual environments and related technologies for health care. Application  of these technologies are being developed for health care in the following areas: surgical procedures (remote surgery or telepresence, augmented or enhanced surgery, and planning and simulation of procedures before surgery); medical therapy; preventive medicine and patient education; medical education and training; visualization of massive medical databases; skill enhancement and rehabilitation; and architectural design for health-care facilities.
To date, such applications have improved the quality of health care, and in the future they will result in substantial cost savings. Tools that respond to the needs of present virtual environment systems are being refined or developed. However, additional large-scale research is necessary in the following areas: user studies, use of robots for telepresence procedures, enhanced system reality, and improved system functionality.

Immersive Virtual Telepresence (IVT) tools are virtual reality environments combined with wireless multimedia facilities - real-tim  video and audio – and advanced input devices – tracking sensors, biosensors, brain-computer interfaces. For its features IVT can be considered an innovative communication interface based on interactive 3D visualization, able to collect and integrate different
inputs and data sets in a single real-like experience. In this paper we try to outline the current state of research and technology that is relevant to the development of IVT in medicine. Moreover, we discuss the clinical principles and possible advantages associated with the use of IVT in this field.

Given the high incidence of brain injury in the population, brain damage rehabilitation is still a relatively undeveloped field. Virtual  reality (VR) has the potential to assist current rehabilitation techniques in addressing the impairments, disabilities, and handicaps associated with brain damage. The main focus of much of the exploratory research performed to date has been to investigate  the use of VR in the assessment of cognitive abilities, but there is now a trend for more studies to encompass rehabilitation training strategies. This review describes studies that have used VR in the assessment and rehabilitation of specific disabilities resulting from brain injury, including executive dysfunction, memory impairments, spatial ability impairments, attention deficits, and unilateral visual neglect. In addition, it describes studies that have used VR to try to offset some of the handicaps that people experience after brain injury. Finally, a table is included which, although not an exhaustive list of everything that has been published, includes many more studies that are relevant to the use of VR in the assessment and rehabilitation of brain damage. The review concludes that the use of VR in brain damage rehabilitation is expanding dramatically and will become an integral part of cognitive assessment and rehabilitation in the future.

Virtual reality (VR) entails the use of advanced technologies, including computers and various multimedia peripherals, to produce a simulated (i.e., virtual) environment that users perceive as comparable to real world objects and events. With the aid of specially designed transducers and sensors, users interact with displayed images, moving and manipulating virtual objects, and performing other actions in a way that engenders a feeling of actual presence (immersion) in the simulated environment. The unique features and flexibility of VR give it extraordinary potential for use in work-related applications. It permits users to experience and interact with a life-like model or environment, in safety and at convenient times, while providing a degree of control over the simulation that is usually not possible in the real-life situation. The work-related applications that appear to be most promising are those that employ virtual reality for visualization and representation, distance communication and education, hands-on training, and orientation and navigation. This article presents an overview to the concepts of VR focusing on its applications in a variety of work settings. Issues related to potential difficulties in using VR including side effects and the transfer of skills learned in the virtual environment to the real world are also reviewed. The article concludes with a brief discussion of work-related developments that are expected to take place within the next five years.

 

Several recent studies have investigated whether knowledge representation turns possible within virtual reality simulated environments. According to these affirmative results different clinical applications were developed in psychology. Among these applications virtual reality seems to have a specific role in assessment and treatment of neuropsychological diseases. This chapter will firstly investigate possibilities and challenges carried from virtual-reality-based neuropsychological application focusing both on patient’s and therapist’s point of view. Afterward it will provide a survey of research and intervention application examples. More in detail a clear explanation of contribution goals will be discussed, in order to place research and applied works within a cognitive neuroscience frame of reference, according with their usefulness and effectiveness in clinical treatment. Fulfilling these objectives neuropsychological virtual reality approaches in memory, motor abilities, executive functions and spatial representation will be shown.

Understanding how to use immersive virtual reality (VR) to support clinical practice presents a substantial challenge for the designers and users of this emerging technology. Taking this challenge this paper describes VR as a new medium: a communication medium in the case of multi-user VR and a communication interface in single-user VR.
Two are the core characteristics of VR as communication tool: the perceptual illusion of nonmediation and the sense of community. The first characteristic of a satisfying virtual environment is the disappearance of mediation, a level of experience where both the VR system and the physical environment disappear from the user's phenomenal awareness. The second characteristic is the sense of community developed by interaction.
Through interaction made possible by multi-user VR, individuals find or form groups that share interests. So, information exchange becomes the carrier for expressing self-concept and eliciting emotional support.
Within this view, experiencing presence and telepresence do not depend so much on the faithfulness of the reproduction of ‘physical’ aspects of ‘external reality’ - which is also a social production, and not a primitive or ‘natural’ fact - as on the capacity of simulation to produce a context in which social actors may communicate and cooperate.
The consequences of this approach for the design and the development of clinical oriented VR systems are presented, with the methodological and technical implications for the study of advanced human-computer interaction.