Medicine in the Metaverse
At last, something useful from virtual world technology
I’m in a small meeting room in South London looking at Jerry, a middle aged man in a hospital gown, who appears far from well. When I walk behind him I notice he’s got a fresh scar on his back which has just been stitched up, and he keeps scratching at his face.
“What do you think is wrong with him?” David, who is standing next to me, asks. I shrug my shoulders - I’m not a doctor after all - and David reveals that Jerry is suffering from anaphylactic shock because he is allergic to the penicillin he was given when he arrived in casualty.
I take off the Microsoft Hololens headset I’ve been wearing and Jerry disappears. He was an actor captured in a holographic process, and we are in the offices of the gaming platform Unity, rather than a hospital. As for David, he’s David King Lassman founder of GigXR, a company with ambitions to transform medical education using the Unity engine which powers games such as Call of Duty Mobile and Pokemon Go.
The demo I’ve just seen uses mixed reality - better known to most of us as Augmented Reality - to take student doctors and nurses through a number of scenarios. They can don Hololens headsets or join the lesson remotely using an app on their smartphones. All of the students can interact with an instructor and examine Jerry, helped by a display showing his vital signs - his blood pressure seems a little high.
“We are huge enthusiasts for mixed reality,” says David King Lassman. “We think it's going to transform the way we teach our doctors and nurses of tomorrow.” He explains that medical education has always been an expensive business, with students having to dissect bodies, examine lifelike models or interact with actors who simulate various conditions.
But he says the mixed reality experience can be both cheaper and more effective for the students: “If we can learn how to do things like a Caesarean section, and we can do it in a simulated way, but in a way that is hyper realistic, then not only am I going to learn how to do that faster, I'm going to have more empathy with how that is experienced in a clinical environment.”
The pandemic of course accelerated the need for this kind of innovation, with medical education disrupted by lockdowns and the need for hospitals to focus on urgent care. GigXR, only founded in 2015, has won customers in the UK’s NHS, in American and Australian healthcare education and across much of the rest of the world - impressive in an industry which has been cautious about adopting new technology.
I wondered whether that growth would slow as we return to normality and students and instructors yearn for real-world interactions. But King Lassman says there remains a powerful economic incentive for educational institutions to stick with this approach:”It's going to extend their pool of students. You can be anywhere in the world and participate in a lesson without having to get on a plane and come to campus.”
After all the hype, first about the second coming of virtual reality, then about augmented and mixed reality and now around the metaverse, I’ve been somewhat sceptical about the appetite for these technologies outside gaming. Over the last decade I’ve been told that VR and AR can do everything from cure phobias to train lift engineers, without seeing much evidence of real world adoption.
But Dave Rhodes, Senior Vice President of Unity, comes on the line from San Francisco to tell us that five years ago the company noticed something interesting happening with its game engine: “One of our epiphanies was that there were many creators and developers outside the gaming industry that were using Unity - this platform, this game engine - with zero help from us.”
Unity decided to push this area of its business and, five years on, a quarter of its $1.2 billion annual turnover comes from outside gaming, with customers in the automotive and aerospace industries as well as in healthcare.
The visions of the metaverse promoted by Mark Zuckerberg have veered between the unlikely, the creepy and the downright embarrassing. But if the future involves using mixed reality to provide better training for doctors and nurses, I think we can all buy into that.