Having a loved one at home feeling down and depressed because of sitting home all day long and watching same old boring TV programs? Having difficulties to take your loved one outdoor, on the roads and on vacations, because of his/her limited mobility, lack of time and money? Perhaps Virtual Reality (VR) is the way to go for your loved one. He/she can sit home, while sightseeing around the world, with an experience just as as if the visit was taking place in reality.
Virtual Reality (VR) for Elderlies
As a former emergency room doctor, Dr. Sonya K. found her way to Virtual Reality (VR) through a series of tough requests. A few years ago, she was running a house-call practice when she received a call for help from a woman whose 88-year-old mother had stopped eating and drinking. As a result, she’d made three trips to the emergency room in a month, racking up more than $50,000 in medical bills. When Dr. Sonya asked the older woman why she’d stopped eating, Dr. Sonya recalls her patient replied: ” No one loves me. No one cares about me. I don’t matter anymore. Why should I eat, why should I drink, why should I live? I just want to die today.” Dr. Sonya knew that seniors often end up in the hospital for preventable conditions — like dehydration, malnutrition and electrolyte imbalances — exacerbated by loneliness and lack of self-care.
Interactions such as the one with Virginia led Dr. Sonya to establish a new line of efforts to alleviate the problem. Staffers regularly phone seniors at home to check on their mood, medications and appointments, and prompt them to chat about positive subjects, like what makes them happy or what they could do to bring joy to someone else. But then one day, as Dr. Sonya was giving a talk about her service, a man in the audience asked: “What about my mom?” His mother has dementia, he said, and couldn’t have a coherent phone conversation. Finding a solution for his mom, Dr. Sonya says, became her “new homework assignment.”
By chance, Dr. Sonya had been reading about VR (Virtual Reality) and decided to attend a VR seminar, where someone let her use an Oculus headset to walk through a virtual garden, and she “totally fell in love” with the medium. Convinced the older patients would like it, too, she borrowed a friend’s headset and took it to a preventive care conference. By the time she was done, she already had directors of assisted-living facilities making inquiries about the VR headset. That convinced her that the concept could sell, but she wanted to make sure VR could actually make people feel better.
Dr. Sonya has now incorporated VR into her routine practice. Virginia A. is 103 years old, and she is about to take her sixth trip into Virtual Reality (VR). In real life, she is sitting on the sofa in the bay window of her San Francisco assisted-living facility. Next to her, Dr. Sonya K. gently tugs the straps that anchor the headset over Virginia’s eyes. But in the virtual world, Virginia is on a Hawaiian beach, and it’s sunset, and she is surrounded by a glistening sea and a molten, purple-red sky. If she looks up, she sees the fronds of an enormous palm tree, and falling rainbow specks that dance in the air like the light from a disco ball. “Hello, it’s so nice to see you again,” comes Dr. Sonya’s prerecorded voice from inside the headset. “It’s such a beautiful day today, isn’t it?” “Oh my goodness!” says Virginia, sounding delighted. She turns her head slowly from side to side, taking in the details of the virtual landscape: little grass shacks, twists of driftwood, outcroppings of volcanic rock. “Hey, that’s really pretty!” “In the back, look at this,” she continues, wriggling around to see the imaginary world behind her. “Terry, you’ve got to see this, too!” she calls to her son, who is watching nearby.
Easing Chronic Pain, Anxiety and Depression
“There are over 100 clinical research papers that are already published that show proven positive clinical outcomes using VR in managing chronic pain, anxiety and depression,” Dr. Sonya says. “And in dementia patients, all those three elements are very common.” For example, in the 1990s, pioneering researchers at the University of Washington developed SnowWorld, an icy virtual environment that reduced pain for burn victims during wound treatment. More recently, Dr. Albert Rizzo’s lab at the University of Southern California has helped military veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, by offering exposure therapy in virtual environments. The Veterans United Foundation has created virtual reality experiences of veterans’ memorials, for vets who can’t travel to see them. And scientists at the Chronic Pain Research Institute have tested a virtual meditative walk meant to help users manage pain and stress.
VR is typically formulated for younger users, and often asks them to play games, solve puzzles, master new information and move around energetically. But many of Dr. Sonya’s clients use wheelchairs; those with advanced dementia cannot read or follow verbal commands. Nearly all of them are unfamiliar with the conventions of virtual reality devices, which assume that the user knows to swivel his or her head to take in the 360-degree view, to move around to make the landscape scroll, or to tap objects to interact with them. Instead, many of Dr. Sonya’s clients go through entire sessions seated, heads cast down, hands folded in their laps. Sometimes her staff has to gently pivot clients’ chins to help them look to the side.
But exploration and beating puzzles aren’t the point of this kind of VR: The environments have no story-line, just scenery. Dr. Sonya says the name Aloha VR is a nod to her experiences working in a Hawaiian emergency room, where she came to admire the state’s “ohana spirit,” a concept that encompasses love for extended family and respect for elders. The point is to make users feel safe and welcome. “Dementia patients often feel lost, because they feel that they don’t belong anywhere,” says Dr. Sonya — they may be confused about their surroundings or who they are, or estranged from family members overwhelmed by their care. By giving them a beautiful beach, Dr. Sonya said, “I want them to feel found again.”
In addition to having private clients, Dr. Sonya conducts group therapy sessions at Bay Area assisted-living centers, where a dozen or so people take turns with the goggles. Although some of her clients struggle with verbal communication, they seem to have found other ways to express enjoyment. One client, Dr. Sonya said, simply blew kisses. Another hummed happily. A third stole 40 minutes in the headset, repeatedly asking for “Just a little more, hon.” A few just go to sleep.
Get yours today
There are still challenges for adopting VR to day-to-day life of seniors. The headsets can be heavy; it can take seniors a while to warm up to trying them. And while prices for mobile VR equipment have come down, it still can be costly enough that prevents each client to own one for herself/himself. However, thanks to technological advances, both of the drawbacks are being diminished as the the VR devices are becoming tailored for elderly use. Consult with your extended family member at Redan Home Health to see what is available for you, and maybe a different reality is awaiting yourself or your loved ones at home!
“Having difficulties to take your loved one outdoor, on the roads and on vacations, because of his/her limited mobility, lack of time and money? Perhaps Virtual Reality (VR) is the way to go for your loved one. He/she can sit home, while sightseeing around the world, with an experience just as as if the visit was taking place in reality.”
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