Meike Muzzi, 83, is in palliative care at Bridgepoint Health, but escapes from her hospital room using virtual reality. (CBC )
“What you’ve brought me so far has been beautiful,” Muzzi says, settling the soft black material of the goggles into the creases around her eyes.
Virtual Reality is not just for Gaming, and the Healthcare Industry is most definitely taking that statement to heart. Bridgepoint Health, formerly known as Bridgepoint Active Healthcare, is a complex care and rehabilitation hospital and research centre in Toronto, Canada, affiliated with the University of Toronto.
David Parker, an IT consultant, had the idea of using VR as therapy this past Christmas after he received a headset as a gift. He used it to take his wife’s grandma to Venice, a virtual trip on a gondola. Once he saw the extremely positive reaction she had, the idea to bring it to terminally ill patients began to materialize.
“I’m not just dumping a headset on them,” he said. “I’m actually sort of progressing it so they get the feeling that they’re doing a trip or doing something that’s special. One of the things that patients really struggle with when they get a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness … they can often lose their sense of who they are, sort of lose the sense of what’s meaningful to them in their life,” she said. “So a big part of what we do in palliative care is help them reconnect to who they are.”
How can we virtually start to cross items off [the patient’s] bucket list?”
A beautiful story coming from the Great White North!
