New mHealth Platform Pushes AR, VR Services Toward Remote Care Space

Healthcare providers interested in adding virtual or augmented reality to remote patient monitoring programs may soon have the mHealth technology to do so.

XRHealth, the Israel-based mHealth company developing AR and VR applications for healthcare, has unveiled a connected health platform that will allow providers to continuously monitor patients while they’re using the technology in their homes.

“With the roll out of 5G throughout the globe, the new technology implications for the telehealth industry are enormous,” Eran Orr, the company’s CEO, said in a press release issued today, as the company unveiled its service at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon conference in Hawaii. “Patients will be able to use high bandwidth technology like virtual reality or augmented reality anywhere they are located – whether in a rural or urban area. Healthcare will become much more affordable and accessible to anyone while innovation will be endless.”

The announcement shines a light on the ever-expanding uses for AR and VR in healthcare, and gives the platform a telehealth boost that could push the service to new populations.

Championed by health systems like Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai, which hosts an annual conference focused on VR applications in healthcare, the mHealth platform is now in use in dozens of locations around the country to help patients with issues like pain management, physical therapy and treatment of nervous disorders like anxiety. Earlier this year, Cedars-Sinai presented the results of a study that found VR to be effective as a digital therapeutic for in-patient treatment of pain.

“We found that on-demand use of VR in a diverse group of hospitalized patients was well tolerated and resulted in statistically significant improvements in pain versus a control group exposed to an in-room ‘health and wellness’ television channel,” the study, led by Brennan Spiegel, MD, concluded. “These results build upon earlier studies and further indicate that VR is an effective adjunctive therapy to complement traditional pain management protocols in hospitalized patients.”

“There are many potential opportunities [in VR therapy] that we should be looking at,” Spiegel, a gastroenterologist, director of health services research for Cedars-Sinai and a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA, told mHealthIntelligence in a 2016 interview.

With the development of consumer-grade VR devices by the likes of Samsung, Dell, HTC and, of course, Oculus, the consumer market is well ahead of the pack. Only in the past few years have Samsung and companies like XRHealth and AppliedVR brought that platform into healthcare.

Now, with platforms that can extend outside the hospital or doctor’s office and connect to a patient in a remote clinic or at home, the possibilities extend to RPM and other telehealth programs.

Originally Posted in mheathintelligence on December 5, 2019, by Eric Wicklund.