Not Just Child's Play
With their unique ability to distract, educate, and entertain, video games are increasingly being used to help heal and soothe the sick
Heidi Neisinger didn't need a study to convince her of the value of an alternate universe. In 2003, her son pulled a pot of boiling water onto himself and spent months in excruciating recovery at Harborview Burn Center in Seattle. With burns over more than 30 percent of his body and his skin raw from graft sites on an additional 50 percent, Nathan, now 8 years old, got hysterical at the thought of his twice-daily treatments in the scrub tank, where his wounds were washed and dead skin removed. He was too young to safely be given enough narcotics to ease his pain. But when Nathan was playing SnowWorld, he was so completely transported that the nurses could lift his arms, stretch his skin, and clean him, sometimes without his noticing. "It was an ordeal every day," says Neisinger. "That game was an answer to my prayers."
Set the scene. If SnowWorld is meant to ignore a painful reality, the virtual worlds created to treat PTSD and phobias, for example, do just the opposite. Exposure therapy has long been the accepted method of treating PTSD, but it has an unavoidable flaw: Victims must re-create their trauma. "You never know exactly what they're imagining," says Rizzo, who has been using virtual reality to help soldiers returning from Iraq suffering from PTSD. "With VR we know what we're introducing into the scene."
Using a combat helmet equipped with VR goggles, a "base shaker" at foot level that vibrates to simulate riding in a humvee or tank, and a special machine to create smells such as burning gasoline, Rizzo can slowly return patients to combat. He can add, for example, familiar-looking buildings, the sounds of morning prayers, or a suspicious-looking merchant. He can also monitor a patient's emotional state. "If it gets to be too much, we back them out," says Rizzo, whose program is one of several being tested at military bases. VR is also being used to battle anxiety and phobias such as claustrophobia, which results in up to 20 percent of all MRIs being aborted midway by patients.
But VR can be expensive and has only recently begun undergoing the type of clinical testing that would make doctors and insurers take notice. The interactive headset for SnowWorld, for instance, runs about $30,000. However, with more game makers and researchers focusing on video therapies, the cost and technology gap is expected to narrow.
It seems the perennially vilified video game may be on its way to a new reality: a hero of health and medicine.
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