Improving the experience of doctoral appointments

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how some boring medical treatments could be enhanced using VR technology.

Yesterday, I had an appointment with my dentist for a yearly check-up. I also used this appointment for a prophylaxis session. During this session, my human-computer interaction brain started to think about the procedure. I was just lying around and at some point due to some sandblasting I even had to wear some goggles to protect my eyes. In addition, there was no chance for a communication for obvious reasons. Why do we not provide some possibilities to make this entire procedure less boring?

In the end, I came up with two different ideas that could greatly enhance such a session: 1) provide a method to interact with the dentist and 2) use mobile VR to provide an immersive distraction. The first idea would be easy to realize. The medical office already has a good digital infrastructure allowing for the display of (x-ray) images and other information inside of the treatment rooms. The interaction with this system is controlled via mobile devices like tablets. This also provides the possibility of drawing directly into images to highlight specific information. With this infrastructure in place, it should be easy to combine this with a text-to-speech feature. By providing patients with mobile devices, they would be able to communicate with the dentist and could have a conversation.

The mobile VR idea resulted from the fact that I had to wear these protective goggles. By finding a way to make mobile VR HMDs easier to clean, patients could immerse themselves into virtual worlds during a prophylaxis session. This, in addition, would also allow for a possible reduction of anxiety when other treatments need to be carried out. By reducing the sensory information from the real world and replacing them with computer generated ones, a patient’s awareness for being inside of a treatment room would be highly reduced. This aligns with other approaches that provide children in hospitals with mobile VR devices to reduce their anxiety about lengthy therapies.

In the end, by providing ways to overcome limitations, e.g., not being able to speak during a treatment, or to distract from the surrounding environment, e.g., by using immersive VR devices, the experience of doctoral appointments could be improved. This in return would also increase a patient’s motivation to attend check-ups.