Imagine the elderly in nursing homes, often bedbound, being able to travel again to both exotic destinations and beautiful places in their home country. We’ll soon make this happen with our own VR product!

• Flying Kale and WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED are about to create their first product for social care – VR travelling experiences tailored for the elderly
• The first round of user testing at the Nursing home Chodov showed great potential
• We’re on the lookout for social care experts, dementia researchers and other partners who could help us bring this product concept to life

We have some very exciting news for you – Flying Kale has recently made the first crucial steps towards its own digital product for social care, and WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED’s startup developers have lended a helping hand. The product concept is fairly simple: We aim to leverage the immersive, activating potential of the VR technology to bring the clients of elderly homes new perceptions and exciting travelling experiences.

We partnered with Nursing home Chodov to conduct the first testing session with real end users – the clients of the nursing home. Each participant underwent a series of immersive experiences ranging from a meeting with a wild elephant in Botswana to a commented walk in the streets of Rome. These experiences were followed by short interviews about the form, content and comfort of what the participants have just seen and heard.

The results exceeded our expectations. There is indeed a great potential for virtual reality to enrich the lives of nursing home clients with fun and excitement while also bringing them some real medical impact. And we can’t wait to make this happen!

Flying Kale is a newly founded team focused on digital product design and immersive app development with positive health and social impact. WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED’s VR developers will be responsible for the technical side of this project.

We are now looking for social care experts, dementia researchers and other partners who might be interested in offering a helping hand to bring this product concept to life as fast as possible. If you’re interested, get in touch and stay tuned for more updates!

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How are the ever-present cameras going to affect our privacy? We discuss how the perception of privacy shifts in the digital age. Should we still care about what information is available about us?

In the era of deep fakes and other computer-generated imagery, it seems to us that personal privacy is something we will have to learn live without. But maybe – can this bring us more freedom and less hypocrisy?

Episode 2 of our podcast is available on YouTube and all your favourite streaming platforms.

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Our team has recently set off on an ambitious journey to developing a mobile game that will help people diminish their OCD symptoms. People who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (You’d be surprised how many of your friends also live with at least mild OCD symptoms!) have to deal with reoccuring uncontrollable thoughts (obsessions) and rituals or behaviours (compulsions) they feel urged to perform on a regular basis. Are you wondering how a mobile game can be of help with such a condition? Then read on!

While severe OCD symptoms that completely prevent people from fulfilling basic everyday tasks affect only a small fraction of the population, chances are you and most of the other readers of this article have experienced some level of obsessive-compulsive unease at some point in your life. Whether these oppressive feelings were triggered by thoughts about potential catastrophes or an occasional urge to keep rearranging everything around you, they could have been categorised as mild to moderate OCD symptoms. And we at WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED have decided to tackle these with a beautifully designed mix of technology and fun.

Our mobile game concept rests on the foundations of Exposure response prevention (ERP) therapy which entails exposing people to symptoms-triggering stimuli and preventing them from performing the urged reaction or ritual. This first leads to a moment of unease, after which patients realize that not performing their compulsions does not make the whole world collapse. And this positive realization strengthens over time with regular repetition of the ERP therapy. In other words, by playing the game regularly, people will become more confident that they can overcome their obsessions and compulsions.

Although the mobile game remains quite far from being developed at the moment, we’ve already had some great successes. During the summer, we managed to develop the initial idea into a concrete project and partnered with the Czech National Institute of Mental Health (Národní ústav duševního zdraví) which will bring the highest level of psychiatric expertise to the table. Their staff will also help us conduct the medical part of our user testing. In the next few weeks, our app development agency in London together with colleagues from Amsterdam and Prague will start working on the initial design and game mechanics. We’ll keep you posted via our blog – stay tuned for more info about this exciting health game project!

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Let me start this overview of the key insights I learned at the CBC 2019 by depicting my foggy early-morning journey to the 5^th annual conference of UCL’s Centre for Behaviour Change, which offered me a surprisingly comprehensive reminder of the event’s importance. Embarking the plane and trying to catch my train connection to the city, I ran past dozens of people treating themselves with a proper English breakfast – coffee and cigarettes.

A couple minutes later, I witnessed another interesting sight – a couple of commuters snacking on crisps at 7.30am. Their swollen eyes were signalling both severe sleep deprivation and excessive levels of stress, two conditions most probably shared by the majority of their fellow travellers. And finally, some twenty minutes later, I stepped out into the wilderness of the King’s Cross neighbourhood where I my path was completely blocked by an army of smartphone zombies nervously trying to catch up with the extremely fast-changing world that we live in these days.

My morning journey from Amsterdam was merely one of the testaments to the many public health issues we are currently facing. We need continuous improvement and innovation of our health behaviour change strategies and applications to keep up with the ever-evolving societal problems. And the UCL’s conference on “Behaviour Change for Health: Digital and other Innovative Methods”, during which I also had the honour to present my own research on Dutch healthy lifestyle interventions using mobile apps and social media, seemed like the perfect place to stimulate such thoughts.

The event’s two-day programme offered an incredible amount of captivating insights. Instead of providing you with a tiny glimpse into every this and that, let me focus on my five key lessons learned with regard to the role of digital innovation in future health promotion efforts.

Machine Learning Can Adaptively Personalize Interventions

There are very few domains these days in which data analytics do not play an absolutely fundamental role yet. The opening keynote by Dr Jennifer Turgiss from Johnson & Johnson demonstrated that health promotion will soon be crossed off this list too. This talk focused on the interactions of data science, behaviour science, and technology advances, and showed how this interplay can be of incredible benefit to both researchers and practitioners.

By putting unsupervised machine learning algorithms to use, we are now able to successfully merge datasets acquired from various sources such as mobile apps and tracking devices and draw meaningful conclusions about the target group members’ responses to our tactics. As Dr Turgiss highlighted, there is no one strategy that would be effective for all sub-types of the target audience. Therefore, we should focus on behaviour phenotypes – tracking longitudinal progress of individuals to find behaviour/compliance patterns with Big Data clustering. Further improvements of this approach should allow us to maximize our future interventions’ effectivity with adaptive personalization.

Innovation is Key Also for Evaluation

While still breathing through the post-performance stress after my own talk, I got intrigued by the project presented by Quynh Pham from the University of Toronto. In no more than eight minutes, we learned quite a lot about the functionality of the newly developed Analytics Platform to Evaluate Effective Engagement (APEEE). The platform serves as a very useful tool for real-time quantification and visualization of effective engagement with our intervention.

With geolocation engagement trends calculated from data collected by the participants themselves, APEEE depicts a clear image of an intervention’s reach in real-time. This way, we can make empirical evidence collection much faster and more reliable, which may greatly speed up the whole behaviour change intervention loop.

e-Health Would Greatly Benefit from a Unified Digital Infrastructure

The second keynote of the conference focused on nation-wide opportunities for public health innovation. According Dr Felix Greaves from Public Health England, the UK’s healthcare system should try to harness the potential of digital technologies to create a unified infrastructure including all patient records. Every future public health intervention could then capitalize on this infrastructure, which would incredibly boost its feasibility and cost-effectiveness.

The best thing about this talk was that the speaker was one of the people responsible for such innovations. Therefore, at CBC 2022, maybe we will already hear a talk about what a breakthrough this unified digital infrastructure indeed turned out to be.

Engagement with UX/UI As Important As Engagement with Behaviour Change

One of the several Johnson & Johnson speakers of the event, Nnamdi Ezeanochie, started his talk with an interesting remark – Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are not suitable for measuring the impact of our interventions anymore. This traditional empirical evaluation method is falling behind due to the outbreak of emerging technologies such as apps or wearables.

The speaker introduced several research methodologies created to tackle this issue, and concluded his talk with an even more crucial claim – engagement with UX/UI design is as much important as engagement with the behaviour change mechanisms. This is an idea we at WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED (mobile app agency in London) very much agree with. You can spend months on planning out the perfect behaviour change model and techniques but if you don’t spend the same amount of energy on designing a delightful and effective user experience too (or don’t hire us to do that for you!), the intervention will be nothing but a waste of time and money.

Peer-to-Peer Healthcare Is All About Sharing Experiences

Another keynote, another great source of inspiration. The closing talk of the conference by Professor Sherry Pagoto from the University of Connecticut offered a deep dive into the mechanisms of health-related social support via digital channels. The concept of Peer-to-Peer Healthcare summarizes the fact that patients with a similar condition are increasingly interconnected, interacting with each other online.

Oh, and there’s one more thing – we will design and develop its own health-focused serious mobile game! The project is still in its infancy but we should be able to share more details with you quite soon – keep checking our blog an subscribe to our newsletter so that no WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED news escape your attention!

The research of Professor Pagoto and her team showed that when it comes to online interactions between patients, more meaningful engagement and stronger intervention social support is generated by personal experiences compared to sharing factual information. Even though patients tend to seek more information from other patients than their doctors, it is the experience of others which actually has an impact on their behaviour change progress.

In sum, not only the CBC 2019 substantially broadened my digital health horizons with insights into digital innovations in healthcare and public health promotion, the conference also had me meet many interesting like-minded people from London, Brussels, the Netherlands or Sri Lanka. WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED is now on the look-out for health-focused innovation projects – if you have an idea of this sort in mind, please visit our contact page and get in touch, we’d be happy to become your tech partners.

Author: Marek Háša

Are you interested in digital health innovations? Connect with me on LinkedIn!

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Hearing an excited sigh might be a surprising sensation at the department for severely ill at a children’s hospital. Although Toben, an 11-year-old suffering from Sickle Cell Disease (on the picture above), is just about to undergo a very painful everyday procedure, his charming smile indicates that the Virtual Reality (VR) headset he wears has already brought him to places far more pleasurable and captivating than his hospital bed. Helping patients to cope with excessive pain is just one of the many promising examples of the potential of Virtual and Augmented Reality (AR) in health care. This article will present you with three (plus one) key areas where AR/VR applications have already disrupted traditional approaches to education, treatment, and therapy.

If you consider AR/VR to be not much more than mere entertainment during coffee breaks at practically every marketing conference, that’s fine, this perception is quite common. Hopefully this article will change your mind. Let’s kick off with some numbers. The Augmented and Virtual reality market value is estimated to rise from $20 billion to $192 billion within the next three years. When looking at the statistics from previous years, such a rocket rise indicates that we really have some very exciting AR/VR times ahead!

One could think that the vast majority of this value can be attributed to entertainment. However, AR/VR app development has already established itself as an important innovation approach in many other areas. One of them is health care, in which VR is forecast to reach the value of $3.8 within the next twelve months. Where could all this money go? Let’s take a look at some practical AR/VR applications in medicine.

Interactive Education

MedicalRealities is a prime example of the innovations in the training of future surgeons. The VR application combines 4K 360° footage from real surgeries with extremely detailed CGI models. Aspiring surgeons can use the app to learn every step of the necessary procedures in a perfectly safe yet still incredibly immersive environment.

Young eye surgeons may capitalize on the potential of Genetech, another VR-powered training tool which has already succeeded on the medical education market. From the common good perspective, investments into such tools are more than desirable – no other technology could provide future medical specialists with such an immersive hand-on learning experience without the involvement of real patients. Moreover, interactive medical education is being designed for the patients themselves too! To name one AR/VR application, EyeDecide is using a computerized virtual environment to teach the general public the anatomy of an eye, and to explain various diseases and procedures patients might have to undergo in the future.

Improved Treatment Accessibility and Delivery

With the world population on the rise, the lack of skilled doctors is becoming an increasingly alarming issue. This is especially the case with areas difficult to access, or with highly specialized procedures. Telemedicine offers a way to diminish distances and serve patients regardless of the doctor’s whereabouts. With AR, the potential of telemedicine increases tremendously. One of the promising solutions in this area is Proximie, an app which employs AR to enable complete surgical procedures being carried out over distance in cooperation with a colleague present with the patient.

Apart from improving the accessibility of health care, AR applications also open up new opportunities for physiotherapy and rehabilitation. Ghostman is an AR app which allows users to watch their own movements in tandem with the demonstration. This way, rehabilitating patients can adjust their movements in real time, effectively improve their motor skills, and dramatically speed up their treatment progress.

Immersive Therapies

The final area I wish to cover involves the mind. Although AR/VR is all about how real body movements can be incorporated in artificial worlds, immersive experiences provided by these technologies can strongly impact our brain and mental wellbeing too. The article started with the story of Toben, a young patient which is being successfully distracted from a very painful procedure by KindVR, a VR application developed in cooperation with several US research hospitals to provide a deeply immersive and soothing experience when needed. The app was developed for five specific medical procedures, which ensures that the user experience perfectly matches the medical context and serves its purpose well.

Pain management solutions are not the only mind-related application of AR/VR. Research-driven AR/VR design and development has also proven to be useful for many psychological therapies, successfully treating depression or phobias.

Opening Up New Horizons

The cases above are just a small snapshot of the current successes of AR/VR applications within the field of health care. However, the true impact of AR/VR on the future of medicine is yet to come. Just like any other emerging technology, AR/VR has the potential to disrupt traditional approaches to medical education, treatment, and therapy. However, AR/VR’s unique ability to provide truly immersive and interactive virtual experiences suggests that this technology could indeed turn the current health care paradigms upside down. And when that happens, we at WASH & CUT HAIR SALOON LIMITED would be proud to contribute with our own scalable AR/VR design and development.

Images retrieved from:

MedicalRealities: https://cosmicjs.com

Physical therapy example: https://visualise.com/virtual-reality/virtual-reality-healthcare

KindVR: https://www.kindvr.com/about-us

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