Description
Rapid adoption of digital health care technology, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, has created an unprecedented opportunity to deliver real-time, cost-effective, and accessible health care. Although digital health services are increasingly offered through personal devices, such as smartphones, studies have found that the lack of presence and immersion caused by having to operate a phone camera are barriers to effective health care. Since telehealth is involved primarily in the transmission of patient medical information, immersive technologies like virtual reality (VR) could enable more natural and intuitive ways of interacting with the information and improve feelings of presence. Specifically, there is a need to understand how entrenched practices, roles, social and societal norms, concepts, values, and value-laden objects are affected by VR technologies. This understanding could be used to guide the design and development of VR-enabled telehealth applications, and to ensure that effective and efficient care is delivered to Canadians in a manner that they will accept.
This project bridges complementary expertise in public health sciences, privacy, and computer science to evaluate how technological change intersects and diverges from existing clinical practices. We are using virtual play therapy as a case study to explore the suitability of VR in the context of telehealth. Virtual play therapy is a particularly innovative type of therapy that utilizes the buildable and portable digital medium to expand physical play spaces and objects, creates immense opportunities for telehealth, education, communication, and more. It’s also a useful testbed for health care in VR since it involves multiple modes of patient-doctor communication and can engage a wide range of participants, including young children and older adults.