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Virtual Reality (VR) has been known in the gaming industry for a while now, but it has brought a range of new services into the healthcare industry too. The experience provided by Virtual Reality is being used in a variety of healthcare-related applications. There are four medical areas in which VR is active: therapy, surgery related applications, training, and medical research. In this blog we take a closer look at Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT). ‘VRT is the use of simulated interactive and immersive environments as a tool for physical or psychological healthcare applications’.

VRT is mainly used for phobias & posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Cognitive-behavioural therapy has been used to treat a variety of phobias since the 1950s. In this type of therapy, patients learn to identify the thoughts that are causing the feelings or behaviours they want to overcome, and then learn how to replace those thoughts with more helpful ones. Exposure to this is a key component of most cognitive-behavioural therapy. One of the most common phobias is acrophobia, the fear of heights. With the use of VR an environment can be created where the user can be on top of a tall building or working on unstable scaffoldings. This allows the patient to become familiar to the situation and over time control this phobia better. The video below shows how it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhljsCx6Yiw

Multiple VRT applications have been developed to heal patients with other healthcare problems. One of them is MindMaze VR rehabilitation platform. This firm is testing VR in hospitals with victims of a stroke, amputees, and people suffering from other debilitating conditions, to help them regain their muscle strength and movement. Kortex is another VR platform, it helps with stress and sleep problems as it stimulates the mind to create the sleep-stimulating hormones melatonin and serotonin.

Many VR applications in the medical sector are still niche; yet, medical professionals, hospitals, and medical institutions drive growth in the sector by increased interest. ABI Research predicts that: ’VR services in the medical and healthcare segment will generate US$8.9 million in 2017 and will grow to US$285 million in 2022’. This means in increase of more than 3.000%.

To end this blog I would like to refer to a quote by Daniel Freeman, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford, who has been working with VR for 16 years. “There are very few conditions VR can’t help because, in the end, every mental health problem is about dealing with a problem in the real world, and VR can produce that troubling situation for you.”

 

 

ABIresearch. (2017) ‘Virtual Reality in Medicine and Healthcare to Generate US$285 million in 2022’. Available at: https://www.abiresearch.com/press/virtual-reality-medicine-and-healthcare-generate-u/ (accessed at 7 October 2017)

Hattenstone, S. (2017) ‘After, I feel ecstatic and emotional’: could virtual reality replace therapy?. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/07/virtual-reality-acrophobia-paranoia-fear-of-flying-ptsd-depression-mental-health#img-2 (accessed: 8 October 2017)

O’Dowd, E. (2017) Healthcare Virtual Reality Potential Grows for Therapy, Surgery. Available at: https://hitinfrastructure.com/news/healthcare-virtual-reality-potential-grows-for-therapy-surgery (accessed: 9 October 2017)

Vanian, J. (2017) Leonardo DiCaprio Adds Virtual Reality Startup to List of Investments. Available at: http://fortune.com/2017/09/22/leonardo-dicaprio-investments-mindmaze-vr/ (accessed: 8 October 2017)

Winerman, L. (2005) A virtual cure. Available at: http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug05/cure.aspx (accessed: 9 October 2017)

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What happens if you combine one of the oldest industries to one of the newest technologies? We have seen what can happen when a disruptive innovated changes an industry, for example the transport industry, how many drivers will there be in ten years? One of the next possible targets is the food industry, more specifically; restaurants. This industry has been growing steadily since 2009 and in 2015, food and drink sales in the United States restaurant industry amounted to 745.61 billion U.S. dollars (Statista, 2017). Keeping this in mind it is no surprise that tech giants are trying to settle in this industry. Both IBM and MIT have founded AI-technologies that can revolutionize the cooking industry.

IBM has developed a question answering machine over the past 15 years that is called IBM Watson. Watson got world-wide fame when this ‘supercomputer’ defeated two of the world’s best players in a game of Jeopardy!. It now has further evolved and has multiple applications, one of them is IBM Chef Watson. This software works as follows; in the app you type your favorite ingredients or food that you have left in the fridge and Chef Watson will create a dish based on complementary flavors or recipes. This will allow even people that have moderate tasting ability cook like a chef.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created an app that works the other way around. The app lets users identify their food based on a photo. So if you find a photo on Instagram with a nice dish on it, you can put this in the app and it will tell you what ingredients are in there and it will provide a recipe. In testing the app called Pic2Recipe identified the ingredients correctly in 65% of the time. The system uses deep learning to get to know over 1.000.000 recipes and this number only keeps growing. Deep learning is a branch of machine learning based on learning data representations (Bengio et al., 2013). This allows the Pic2Recipe to look at food differently, even in manners unknown to humankind.

Although still in its infancy, food and AI are coming closer together. Next to that, more organizations are getting involved in the food industry and most of them are tech-corporations that are already investing billions of U.S. Dollars in restaurant-industry-specific technologies. So what will this mean for the future? Will there be ‘chefless’ restaurants? Will chefs become more skilled because of the help of Artificial Intelligence in the restaurant industry? Or, will we all be better cooks in future? One thing I do know is that it would be great when fine-dining becomes more approachable.

 

 

 

References

Bengio, Y., Courville, A., & Vincent, P. (2013). Representation learning: A review and new perspectives. IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, 35(8), 1798-1828.

Brandt, R. (2016). Chef Watson has arrived and is ready to help you cook. Retrieved from: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2016/01/chef-watson-has-arrived-and-is-ready-to-help-you-cook/

Conner-Simons, A. Gordon, R. (2017). Artificial intelligence suggests recipes based on food photos. Retrieved from: http://news.mit.edu/2017/artificial-intelligence-suggests-recipes-based-on-food-photos-0720

Kleinman, Z. (2017). AI demo picks out recipes from food photos. Retrieved from: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40681395

Statista (2017). Restaurant industry food and drink sales in the United States from 1970 to 2016 (in billion U.S. dollars). Retrieved from: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203358/food-and-drinks-sales-of-us-restaurants-since-1970/