Virtual reality and augmented reality based affective computing applications in healthcare, challenges, and its future direction
Suma Dawn · 2023
This chapter presents current research in the field of AC with AR and VR in the healthcare and medical fields. There are many uses of AR and VR in healthcare, not just in medical training, teaching, and education, but also in patient education and communication, among others. AC has been utilised in many forms of rehabilitation, mental health, adjunctive and physical therapies, fitness programmes, in the managing and controlling of addiction and phobias, etc. Any newly developed interactive interfaces based on AR can make collaboration between practitioners, patients, and wider stakeholders more engaging and useful. Professional practitioners and students of various medical disciplines can use AR/VR systems to help increase their competence before performing actual treatments on patients, thereby decreasing the risk of patient injury or death. In recent years, AR/VR have become increasingly popular in medical studies. Accordingly, several types of AR/VR system development platforms for clinical applications are also discussed in this chapter. A few commercially available softwares and related hardware are also discussed, as well as some emerging challenges associated with such systems. Although explicit pedagogical and theoretical frameworks are still in their infancy, AR/VR are quickly becoming accepted in the medical field.