Virtual Environment Proves Effective Therapy for Burn Victims

Recovery from serious injury is always hard, but it would be difficult to imagine a more excruciatingly unpleasant recovery process than that which you might have to undergo after sustaining severe burns over a large part of your body. Follow up care includes difficult physical therapy to keep range of movement in badly burned limbs, and regular peeling away of damaged tissue to support healthy skin reconstruction. The sessions are usually daily, lengthy, and extremely painful.

Enter Snow World, a three dimensional virtual environment that has been used to provide both distraction and comfort to patients during this difficult therapy. While the treatment is taking place, the burn victim is playing in a virtual world, filled with ice and snow, hills to slide down and paths to walk, along with the occasional snowball fight with penguins and polar bears.

Snow World was constructed by Dr. Hunter Hoffman, who is director of the University of Washington’s VR Analgesia Research Center. Renowned musician Paul Simon contributed background music, which adds another soothing component to the overall experience. Hoffman contends, and has research to back it up, that it isn’t just the “game” aspect of his application that helps, but also the 3D surround element of the virtual environment – often referred to as “immersiveness” or “presence”. It is the feeling that you are actually within the virtual environment, even if you are represented by an avatar, or viewing the entire imaginary world from a first-person perspective.

Both patient self-report and the more scientific method of fMRI measurement have demonstrated that time spent in the virtual environment reduces the impression of pain and the actual pain signals that are sent to the brain. This in turn can have a profound impact on the amount of pain medication that the patient has to use. Large doses of pain medication have some critical “downsides”, including addiction potential, and a sedative effect which can make it difficult or impossible for the medicated person to have meaningful interactions with others.

Read more about Snow World and one of the very special patients being treated with this technology , and see the environment for yourself at ScienCentral.