Technology transforms: With virtual reality, caregivers experience the patients’ POV

“I was really scared of my mom’s diagnosis,” said Shaw, founder and chief executive of the Los Angeles-based Embodied Labs, an immersive educational technology company that uses virtual reality software to train health care professionals who work with older adults. “I had that avoidance reaction to let the family figure it out without me,” she said. “So after I graduated, I joined the Peace Corps for a two-year stint in the Dominican Republic. I wanted to help and serve, but didn’t know how to in my own family.”

When she was 24, though, she faced it. Shaw, who has an undergraduate degree in public health, moved back to her family home in Winston-Salem, NC, to be a full-time caregiver. “At that point, my mom had fairly advanced dementia, but it was so meaningful to be with her, and we built a special relationship,” she said. Although they became closer, Shaw, now 32, was frustrated. “I struggled so much to imagine how my mom was perceiving the world around her,” she said.

In 2014, she returned to school to earn a Master of Science degree in biomedical visualisation at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her thesis question: If we could step into the world of someone who is aging, could that help health care providers be more effective?

The evolving technology of virtual reality helped her answer that question. And four years ago, Shaw started Embodied Labs, alongside her sister, Erin Washington, who also cared for their mother, and is the chief product officer, and Thomas Leahy, a college classmate, now the firm’s chief technology officer. The company’s software allows users to peer into the body and mind of someone confronted with aging issues: cognitive decline such as Alzheimer’s, age-related vision and hearing loss, or neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and dementia.

The goal is to give users, including medical students, nurses, certified nursing assistants, assisted-living staff members and family caregivers, a better understanding of the challenges facing aging adults with these diseases or impairments through a first-person patient perspective. Medical students, for example, can use the Embodied Labs VR headset and computer software for a 20-minute training program with 360-degree medical illustrations of changes in the brain structure and activity. They can also tap into an immersive visual experience in which the student virtually enters the world of Beatriz, a middle-age woman, as she advances through a decade of Alzheimer’s disease.

In another program, users embody Alfred, a 74-year-old man with high frequency hearing loss and age-related macular degeneration. The idea is to show that hearing and vision loss can make someone appear to have cognitive impairment although they do not. The program experience is a day in Alfred’s life, including interaction with his doctor and his family.

With the virtual reality goggles, the viewer’s eyesight is reduced by a dark spot in the middle of the visual field simulating macular degeneration. The diminishing vision makes eye contact, communication and easy tasks difficult and frustrating. The software also takes the user for a tour of the changes inside the retina as macular degeneration advances.