One of the newest social concepts is that of neurodiversity, it focuses on people with a brain configuration that is different from most people, but that is not harmful to third parties, but to themselves to a greater or lesser degree. This is a problem that affects a large part of the population and has become a concern especially in order to train the new generations and also to rescue adults who have been “lost” due to such problems. Well, it seems that this is one of the potential applications of VR is mental health.
While, on the one hand, Mark Zuckerberg fills his mouth with the metaverse as one of the virtual reality utilities, and on the other, certain subjects from their ivory tower want virtual reality to be something exclusive and unique for them. In the world of mental health, they have developed an application for virtual reality to help treat and support people with attention deficit. Which also with certain modifications could be used for autism spectrum disorder and mental health problems in general.
How can Virtual Reality help mental health?
One of the greatest impotence that exists in the educational world is the number of boys and girls who are lost along the way, not because of intellectual disability, but because of neurodiversity. Their teaching methodologies are not designed for them and it ends in enormous frustration on both sides. Well, ADHD is the leading cause of these problems and the University of Helsinki has decided to use virtual reality to deal with this problem.
The way to do it has been by creating a virtual environment called EPELI , which together with a virtual reality helmet with the ability to track the retina. All this thanks to a series of mini-games, which allow mental health professionals to immediately detect which children have attention deficit and which do not. I eat? Well, through a game in which they have to search and shoot some objects. Users with ADHD would spend longer on each object, but then their eye movement is much faster.
The general idea is not only this specific system, but what has a lot of potential is virtual reality applied to mental health . Because it allows continuous data collection on how patients act in certain situations that cannot be replicated in any other way. Thus, thanks to this, they can obtain information on how the brain of people processes the visual information it receives and not only to facilitate diagnosis , but also to generate applications such as treatment.
Not just for attention deficit
While the metaverse is a pipe dream at the moment, the creation of virtual environments applied to mental health can help in the treatment of autistic children with Savant syndrome , people with Alzheimer’s or senile dementia . It can even be used to treat certain phobias.
So we are talking about the combination of mental health and virtual reality has enormous potential to improve the quality of life of millions of people and an improvement in health systems around the world. It is something easier to achieve and implement with current technology than the creation of metaverses or complex video games and with a clear utility. Who knew that the future potential of VR could end up in the world of mental health?
