New VR Company Using The Psychology of Gaming to Fight Cancer

New advancements in Virtual Reality have long been looked upon as technologies that just haven’t quite found a practical application. Quite often the term VR evokes an image of someone wearing a bulky headset and frolicking within their virtual environment.

But one startup is changing all that and bringing the virtual, into the real world. OnComfort has set its sights one what is arguably the most daunting foe – real or imagined – out there… Cancer!

OnComfort’s founder, Diane Jooris, has a background of experience in using mind/body therapies, such as hypnosis, to help overcome the challenges of patients with their battle against cancer while working at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. While surrounded by a group of innovators, Jooris was diligently working away to discover new approaches to help patients deal with the pain and stress associated with cancer treatments.

As a result of her work, OnComfort now has five VR based applications undergoing trials to improve patient care and efficacy of treatments for their cancer patients.

The new applications from OnComfort include:

• Aqua: An immersive undersea environment designed to reduce both pain and and anxiety through relaxation.
• AMO: An application designed to ease patient pain and anxiety while they undergo short invasive procedures through the use of clinical hypnosis techniques.
• KIMO: An application designed for pediatric patients, KIMO is designed to distract the patient by allowing them to fight off cancer cells in a VR environment both before and during their chemotherapy treatments.
• Spacio: Another application designed for pediatric use, it induces a relaxed state in the patient prior to an MRI or other radiotherapy. This allows the patient to get used to the sounds and confined space that’s associated with this type of treatment.
• Stella: This is another application design specifically for pediatric patients. It is designed to distract the patient during short highly agitating procedures such as an IV start, a blood draw, or a port flush.

Joorvis provides an example of the read world situations where OnComfort is used. In this example, the parent of a child receiving pediatric cancer care arrives at the hospital while a hurried frenzy exists around them. All the nurses are scrambling, parents are in a high stress state, children are crying, in short, a bit of a mad house. By placing the child into the VR environment of Stella, they are taken out of the highly emotional chaos and are provided a game to play where they can travel through a blood vessel and shoot up the cancer cells they find there instead of being terrified as their IV is placed.

While looking at the technology that has been created by Jooris and the team at OnComfort, it’s easy to see how their tech can be used to distract a patient. But advances in medicine, especially those that require a significant investment to get started, must demonstrate real outcomes in a clinical setting.

When asked about the preliminary data collected so far, Jooris provided some amazing, albiet early, results. In the cases of pre-op breast cancer patients who used the OnComfort system 15 minute prior to their procedure, they observed:

• post-op reduction of patient anxiety by 50%
• pain reduction reported at 40%
• the use of pain medications was reduced by 80%
• recovery time was reduced by 50%

Results like this show clear wins for not only the patients undergoing treatment, but also for the healthcare providers that are now assessed on improvement in patient care along with reductions in the length of the patient’s stay.

The possibilities of technology like that developed by OnComfort are already astounding and as more companies enter this new virtual world, it will only get better.

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