Fast Company: Apple Wants Vision Pro to Be a Medical Hub. Here’s How Some Health Organizations Are Already Using It
Fast Company recently interviewed Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS, professor of Medicine and director of Health Services Research at Cedars-Sinai, about how Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is supporting patients’ mental health needs by developing applications for Apple Vision Pro.
Apple Vision Pro is a headset worn over the eyes that projects digital content into the user’s physical space, creating an augmented reality.
Spiegel told Fast Company that a virtual therapy app he helped develop, eXtended-Reality Artificially Intelligent Ally (Xaia), is available for use in Apple Vision Pro.
Xaia provides patients with conversational therapy led by a trained digital avatar that simulates a human therapist. The sessions take place in relaxing virtual environments, such as a meadow or a beach, where patients are also guided through deep-breathing exercises and meditation. Patients hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai have been using the app as a supplemental treatment during their stay.
“It can help get people out of the four walls of their hospital room, into or out of the four walls of their illness experience, and into fantastical new worlds—but with the incredible visual display, we’ve been able to achieve some pretty remarkable effects,” said Spiegel, who holds the Dorothy and George Gourrich Chair in Digital Health Ethics at Cedars-Sinai.
Spiegel told Fast Company that patients can create a customized, calming and immersive world tailored to their individual needs using the app.
“So, if you’re talking about feeling very anxious and upset, then you find yourself in a rock garden,” Spiegel said. “And there’s certain specific music that has been originally composed just for anxiety—we have all of these hours of music for different emotional states.”
He added that there are “hundreds of different audio-visual effects that we can deploy to surround our users in these generated worlds that are ideally, psychologically and emotionally appropriate for the moment.”
Click here to read the complete article in Fast Company.