A–9 STANDING COMMITTEES Academic and Student Affairs Committee

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Research Spotlight: Immersive Virtual Reality, a non-pharmacologic analgesic for U.S. soldiers during painful burn wound cleaning sessions (for combat-related burn injuries) INFORMATION For information only. BACKGROUND Virtual Reality (VR) Analgesia technique invented by Hoffman and Patterson at the UW helps reduce pain of U.S. soldiers during painful severe burn wound cleaning sessions. In 1996, Hunter Hoffman and David Patterson co-originated the new technique of using immersive VR for pain control and began collaborating with Sam Sharar, MD shortly thereafter. Hunter is a VR researcher from the UW Human Interface Technology Laboratory with a background in human cognition and attention. Since 1993 he has been exploring ways to increase the illusion of going inside virtual worlds (presence), how VR affects allocation of attentional resources, and therapeutic applications of VR. SnowWorld, developed at the University of Washington HITLab in collaboration with Harborview Burn Center, was the first immersive virtual world designed for reducing pain. SnowWorld was specifically designed to help burn patients. Patients often report re-living their original burn experience during wound care, SnowWorld was designed to help put out the fire. This interdisciplinary team puts burn patients, including veterans, into VR during wound care and physical therapy. Although this line of research is just beginning (with funding from NIH, the Paul Allen Foundation), Dr. Hoffman and his team are already finding significant drops in how much pain the patients experience during their short visit to virtual reality. More information about Dr. Hoffman's work and Snow World can be found here.

STANDING COMMITTEES Academic and Student Affairs Committee Research Spotlight: Immersive Virtual Reality, a non-pharmacologic analgesic for U.S. soldiers during painful burn wound cleaning sessions (for combat-related burn injuries) (continued p. 2)

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

As an undergrad at the University of Tulsa, Hunter studied memory with Pawel Lewicki, magical thinking with Leonard Zusne (foreshadowing Hunter's later interest in VR) and bio-electromagnetics with Dr. O'Connor (foreshadowing Hunter's current interest in fMRI). Prior to grad school, Hunter then spent a year conducting memory research with Marcia Johnson at Princeton University on "reality monitoring": How people separate memories of real from memories of imagined events. He also studied perception using "illusory

conjunctions" with Bill Prinzmetal. Marcia helped him get into graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle where he worked with legendary eyewitness memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, famous for her research on the malleability of human memory for crimes, accidents, and childhood events, e.g., memory distortions caused by information encountered after the memory was formed. In grad school, he also studied the relation between attention and memory with Geoff Loftus, which influenced his future research in VR analgesia. Hunter received a PhD in Cognitive Psychology (human memory and attention) at UW in 1992 and continued his post-doctoral research on social influences on memory with Larry Jacoby in Canada. In 1993, Hunter returned to Seattle and began virtual reality research at the UW Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT), one of the largest VR research laboratories in the world. The HIT laboratory was founded and is directed by Professor Tom Furness, one of the fathers of virtual reality. Attachments

1. Pain Control During Wound Care for Combat-Related Burn Injuries, Journal of CyberTherapy and Rehabilitation, Summer 2008

2. Virtual-Reality Therapy, Scientific American, August 2004 3. Immersive Virtual Reality: Additional Information for Board of Regents

J o u r n a l o f Cy b e r Th e r a p y & Re h a b i l i t a t i o nS u m m e r 2 0 0 8 , Vo l u m e 1 , I s s u e 2© Vi r t u a l Re a l i t y M e d i c a l I n s t i t u t e

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Corresponding Author:Hunter G. Hoffman, Ph.D, Human Interface Technology Laboratory and Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, WA., www.vrpain.com, hunter@hitL.washington.edu

1 U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, TX.2 Human Interface Technology Laboratory and Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, WA.

We describe the first two cases where virtual reality was added to usual pain medications to reduce excessivepain during wound care of combat-related burn injuries. Patient 1 was a 22 year old male who suffered 3rddegree burns on 32% of his body, including his right hand, during a roadside bomb terrorist attack in Iraq.The nurse administered wound care to half of the right hand during VR and the other half of the same handduring no VR (treatment order randomized). This patient was the first to use a unique custom articulatedrobotic-like arm mounted VR goggle system. Three 0-10 graphic rating scale pain scores for each of the twotreatment conditions served as the primary dependent variables. The patient reported less pain when distract-ed with VR. "Time spent thinking about pain" dropped from 100% during no VR to 15% during VR, “painunpleasantness” ratings dropped from “moderate” (6/10) to “mild” (4/10). Wound care was "no fun at all"(0/10) during no VR but was "pretty fun" (8/10) during VR. However, Patient 1 reported no reduction inworst pain during VR. Patient 2 suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns when his humvee was hit by a terrorist'srocket propelled grenade in Iraq. During his wound care debridement, "time spent thinking about pain" was100% (all of the time) with no VR and 0 (none of the time) during VR, "pain unpleasantness" ratings droppedfrom "severe" (7/10) to "none". Worst pain dropped from "severe" (8/10) to mild pain (2/10). And funincreased from zero with no VR to 10 (extremely fun) during VR. Although preliminary, using a within-sub-jects experimental design, the present study provided evidence that immersive VR can be an effective adjunc-tive nonpharmacologic analgesic for reducing cognitive pain, emotional pain and the sensory component ofpain of soldiers experiencing severe procedural pain during wound care of a combat-related burn injury.

PAIN CONTROL DURING WOUND CARE FOR COMBAT-RELATED BURN INJURIES USING

CUSTOM ARTICULATED ARM MOUNTED VIRTUALREALITY GOGGLES

Christopher Maani, MD1, Hunter G. Hoffman, Ph.D2, Peter A. DeSocio, DO1, Michelle Morrow1, Chaya Galin1,Jeff Magula2, Alan Maiers1, and Kathryn Gaylord1

Introduction.

U.S. soldiers injured in Iraq with significant burns are treated at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research (USAISR)at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, TX. The mean length of inpatient stay for burn patients at this medical center is approx 25 days. (Kauvar et al.) Recovery often involves extensive outpatient physical therapy rehabilitation. Soldiers often move to San Antonio to continue their outpatient physical therapy for six months, a yearor longer. Currently, wounded warfighter inpatients with severe burn wounds may have their bandages removed eachday, so the wound can be inspected, cleaned and kept free of infection. Wounded warriors with severe burns remainconscious during daily wound care. Typically, they receive strong short-acting opioid analgesics and anxiolytics abouttwenty minutes prior to debridement (cleaning of dead skin from their healing burn wound). Despite early, aggressive

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use of opioid analgesics, patients frequently experience severe to excruciating pain during daily burn wound care.(Carrougher et al.) Excessive pain can increase the amount of time it takes caregivers to complete the wound care,and can increase how long the patient remains in the hospital before discharge. Clinical and laboratory studies of civil-ians have shown large drops in subjective pain during virtual reality, (Hoffman et al., 2008 & Hoffman, 2004) and fMRIresults with healthy volunteers show reductions in pain-related brain activity during VR analgesia. (Hoffman et al.,2004) If VR reduces procedural pain in patients with combat-related injuries, this would be a valuable advance in com-bat casualty care with potential widespread military applications in the future. The two patients in this case report arethe first to quantify whether VR distraction can reduce high levels of subjective pain reports in soldiers with combat-related burn injuries undergoing wound care and dressing change. Both patients used a unique articulated robotic-likearm that allowed the VR goggles to be placed near the patient weightlessly, eliminating the need for the patient toput on a VR helmet and reducing the amount of surface contact needed with the patient (see Figure 1A and 1B).

Subject

Patient 1 was a U.S. Army soldier medically evacuated fromIraq to USAISR after suffering severe burns covering 32%of his body approximately 45 days prior to this interven-tion. While a passenger in a vehicle that was attacked byan improvised explosive device (roadside bomb), he experienced full thickness burns on his hands, arms, anterior and posterior chest and distal thighs. In the following weeks, donor skin was harvested from unburnedportions of his body and transplanted as skin grafts to many of his severe burn wounds. In keeping with thestandard practice, continuous wound care and frequentdressing changes were required to optimize the healingprocess.

A 10 minute segment of wound care to the patient's righthand, identified from previous days’ procedures as being

Pain Control During Wound Care for Combat-Related Burn Injuries

Figure 1A and 1B. U.S. Army soldier receiving immersive Virtual Reality to reduce his pain during severe burn wound care, usingour unique articulated arm mounted VR goggles designed by Hoffman and Magula, that hold the displays near the patient’s eyes.Photos and copyrights Hunter Hoffman, U.W.

Figure 2. A snapshot of SnowWorld (the virtual worldburn patients interact with during wound care). Image byworldbuilder Ari Hollander, www.imprintit.com, copyrightHunter Hoffman, UW., www.vrpain.com.

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excessively painful, was divided into two equivalent five minute wound care segments. Pre-medication with two per-cocet tablets by mouth approximately 20 minutes prior to wound care served as the opioid analgesic for this session.During one of the five-minute sessions he received no VR distraction (i.e., standard pre-medication only). During theother five-minute treatment session, the participant looked into the articulated arm mounted VR goggles and under-went wound care while experiencing immersive, interactive VR (randomized to receive VR first or second).

During two brief pauses in the wound care procedure (once after each five minute wound care period), the patientcompleted three subjective pain ratings using Graphic Rating Scales (GRS) labeled 0 – 10 with respect to the preced-ing 5 minutes of wound care. “Please indicate how you felt during the past five minute session by rating your responseon the following scales.” Each question was accompanied by a pictorial example of the labeled graphic rating scalesuch as the "worst pain" rating shown below.

How much TIME did you spend thinking about your pain during the past five minutes? I thought about my pain during Virtual Reality 0 = none of the time, 1-4 = some of the time, 5 = half of the time, 6-9 = most of the time, and 10 = all of the time. How UNPLEASANT was you pain during the Virtual Reality (a similar 10-cm line withnumeric and word descriptors beneath it: 0 = not unpleasant at all, 1-4 = mildly unpleasant, 5-6 = moderately unpleas-ant, 7-9 = severely unpleasant, and 10 = excruciatingly unpleasant)? Rate your WORST PAIN during the past 5 minutes.

|_______________________________________________|

How much FUN did you have during Virtual Reality (10-cm line with numeric and verbal descriptors: 0 = no fun atall, 1-4 = mildly fun, 5-6 = moderately fun, 7-9 = pretty fun, 10 = extremely fun)? To what extent (if at all) did youfeel NAUSEA for any reason during Virtual Reality (10-cm line with numeric and verbal descriptors: 0 = no nauseaat all, 1-4 = mild nausea, 5-6 = moderate nausea, 7-9 = severe nausea, and 10 = vomit)? While experiencing the vir-tual world, to what extent did you feel like you WENT INSIDE the computer-generated world (10-cm line withnumeric and verbal descriptors: 0 = I did not feel like I went inside at all, 1-4 = mild sense of going inside, 5-6 = mod-erate sense of going inside, 7-9 = strong sense of going inside, 10 = I went completely inside the virtual world)? Afterwound care with no VR, each patient was asked the same questions but "during Virtual Reality" was replaced by"without Virtual Reality". After-wound care with no VR, patients were not asked the question about presence.

Such pain rating scales have been shown to be valid through their strong associations with other measures of painintensity, as well as through their ability to detect treatment effects. (Jensen, 2003 & Jensen et al., 2001) The specificmeasures used in the current study were designed to assess the cognitive component of pain (amount of time spentthinking about pain), the affective component of pain (unpleasantness), and the sensory component of pain (worstpain). Affective and sensory pain are two separately measurable and sometimes differentially influenced componentsof the pain experience. (Gracely et al., 1978) Gracely et al., have shown ratio scale measures such as the labeledGraphic Rating Scales used in this study to be highly reliable. In addition, a GRS rating of ‘fun’ during wound carewas measured. (Hoffmann et al., 2008)

Patient 2, a 21-year-old male, was injured when his humvee was hit by a terrorist's rocket propelled grenade in Iraq.The explosion caused 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 15% of his body: lower back, flank, buttox, bilateral hands, bilat-eral upper arms. A 12-minute segment of wound care to the patient's left and right arms identified from previous days’

no pain mild moderate severe worstat all pain pain pain pain

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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procedures as being excessively painful was divided into two equivalent six-minute wound care segments. Pre-med-ication with one fentanyl lollypop (400 mic) and two percocet tablets by mouth approximately 20 minutes prior towound care served as the opioid analgesic for this session. During one of the six-minute wound care sessions hereceived no VR distraction (i.e., standard pre-medication pharmacologies only). During the other six minute woundcare session the participant looked into the articulated arm mounted VR goggles and underwent wound care whileexperiencing immersive, interactive VR (randomized to receive VR first or second). During two brief pauses in thewound care procedure (once after each six minute wound care period), the patient completed three subjective painratings using Graphic Rating Scales (GRS) labeled 0 – 10 with respect to the preceding 6 minutes of wound care, usingthe same measures described above for patient 1.

For both patients, the VR system consisted of a Voodoo Envy laptop with NVIDIA GForce Go 7900 GTX (512 MB)video card; Intel Core 2 Duo (T7400) CPU @ 2.16 GHz, 2 GB RAM @ 994 MHz. While in High Tech VR, eachsubject followed a pre-determined path, “gliding” through an icy 3-D virtual canyon (Figure 2). He ‘looked’ aroundthe virtual environment and aimed via a mouse. He pushed a mouse trigger button to shoot virtual snowballs at virtual snowmen, igloos, and penguins (see www.vrpain.com). Each subject saw the sky when he looked up, a canyonwall when he looked to the left or right, a flowing river when he looked down, and heard sound effects (e.g., a splashwhen a snowball hit the river) mixed with background music by recording artist Paul Simon. Participants looked intoa pair of Rockwell Collins SR-80 VR goggles (see www.imprintit.com) with a custom made neoprene blinder on topand sides, which largely blocked his view of the real world. These VR goggles afforded approximately 80° diagonalfield of view for each of the rectangular eyepieces with 100% overlap between the right and left eye images. The gog-gles were held in place near the patient's eyes by a custom made articulated arm mounting system.

ResultsAs shown in Figure 3 below, Patient 1 reported less pain when distracted with VR (e.g., "time spent thinking aboutpain" dropped from "all the time" during no VR to "some of the time" 1.5 (15%) during VR, “pain unpleasantness”

Figure 3. Patient 1 reported large reductions in amount of time thinking about pain during VR (shown in blue) compared to noVR (shown in red) during severe burn wound care of burn injury resulting from an Improvised Explosive Device (roadside bomb)attack/explosion.

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ratings dropped from “moderate” (6/10) to “mild” (4/10). VR did not reduce Worst pain (0% drop) in Patient 1. Wound care during VR was "pretty fun" (8/10) vs. "no fun at all" (0/10) during no VR and the patient reportedhaving a "moderate sense of going inside the computer-generated world" (6/10).

As shown in Figure 4 below, Patient 2 reported that during his wound care debridement, Time spent thinking aboutpain was 100% with no VR and 0 with VR, "pain unpleasantness" ratings dropped from "severe" (7/10) with no VRto "none" during VR. Worst pain dropped from "severe" (8/10) with no VR to mild pain (2/10) during VR. And funincreased from zero with no VR to 10 during VR. Patient 2 reported having "a strong sense of going inside the computer-generated world" (8/10). Both patients and their wound care nurses noted that they would prefer VR be available for subsequent dressing changes as they found it to be helpful as an adjunctive modality for pain control.Patient 2 was very determined to continue playing SnowWorld as long as possible. And the wound care nurse ofpatient 1 spontaneously remarked she was pleasantly surprised to see that when in VR, the patient was not pulling hishand away from her as she worked on his hand, a "protective" behavior he consistently exhibited during daily woundcare of his hand with No VR.

Figure 4. Patient 2 reported large reductions in pain during VR (shown in blue) compared to no VR (shown in red) during burnwound care of a severe burn injury resulting from a rocket-propelled grenade attack/explosion.

DiscussionThe results of these two case studies demonstrate that immersive VR reduced the reported amount of time patientswith a combat-related burn injury spent thinking about their pain and VR reduced pain unpleasantness. VR did notreduce patient one's worst pain rating during his burn wound care. But VR did reduce patient two's worst pain fromsevere (a rating of 8) down to mild (a rating of 2). Although case studies are scientifically inconclusive and controlledstudies are needed, these results provide the first available evidence that VR can reduce severe acute pain during med-ical procedures (wound care and dressing changes) in patients with combat-related burn injuries. Because excessiveacute pain during medical procedures for combat-related injuries remains a widespread medical problem, and our pre-liminary results support the notion that VR might prove valuable for pain control in combat trauma patients, additional research on this modality with this patient population is warranted.

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Acknowledgments:This study was funded by U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, with help from the Gustavus and Louise Pfieffer ResearchFoundation, and the Scan Design Foundation by Inger and Jens Bruun. Thanks to CPT Charles D. Quick, (USAISR), NancyMolter RN, MN, Ph.D. (USAISR) and SGT Darren Hall (USAISR) for their assistance implementing this technolo-gy in the Burn Center, and to COL Karl E Friedl, Ph.D., (Director of TATRC) Jean-Louis Belard, MD, Ph.D.,(TATRC), Ross and Gloria Chambers (Seattle), singer/songwriter Paul Simon (New York), and Senator Kay BaileyHutchison (Texas) for their encouragement.

ReferencesKauvar DS, Wolf SE, Wade CE, Cancio LC, Renz EM, Holcomb JB. Burns sustained in combat explosions in Operations Iraqi

and Enduring Freedom (OIF/OEF explosion burns). Burns. 2006;32:853-7.Carrougher GJ, Ptacek JT, Sharar SR, Wiechman S, Honari S, Patterson DR, Heimbach DM. Comparison of patient satisfaction

and self-reports of pain in adult burn-injured patients. Journal of Burn Care and Rehabilitation. 2003;24:1-8.Hoffman HG, Patterson DR, Seibel E, Soltani M, Jewett-Leahy L, Sharar SR. Virtual Reality Pain Control During Burn Wound

Debridement in the Hydrotank. Clin J Pain. 2008;24:299-304.Hoffman HG. Virtual-reality therapy. Sci Am. 2004;291:58-65.Hoffman HG, Richards TL, Coda B, Bills AR, Blough D, Richards AL, Sharar SR. Modulation of thermal pain-related brain

activity with virtual reality: evidence from fMRI. Neuroreport. 2004;15:1245-1248.Jensen MP. The validity and reliability of pain measures in adults with cancer. J Pain. 2003;4:2-21.Jensen MP, Karoly P. Self-report scales and procedures for assessing pain in adults. In: Turk DC. Melzack R (editors).

Handbook of pain assessment, 2nd edition. New York: Guilford Press 2001;15-34.Gracely RH, McGrath F, Dubner R. Ratio scales of sensory and affective verbal pain descriptors. Pain. 1978;5:5-18.

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For the past several years, I haveworked with David R. Patterson, a painexpert at the University of WashingtonSchool of Medicine, to determine whetherseverely burned patients, who often faceunbearable pain, can relieve their dis-comfort by engaging in a virtual-realityprogram during wound treatment. Theresults have been so promising that a fewhospitals are now preparing to explorethe use of virtual reality as a tool for paincontrol. In other projects, my colleaguesand I are using virtual-reality applicationsto help phobic patients overcome their ir-rational fear of spiders and to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in sur-vivors of terrorist attacks.

At least two software companies arealready leasing virtual-reality programsand equipment to psychologists for pho-bia treatment in their offices. And the Vir-

tual Reality Medical Center, a chain ofclinics in California, has used similar pro-grams to successfully treat more than 300patients suffering from phobias and anx-iety disorders. Although researchers mustconduct more studies to gauge the effec-tiveness of these applications, it seemsclear that virtual therapy offers some veryreal benefits.

F E W E X P E R I E N C E S are more intensethan the pain associated with severe burninjuries. After surviving the initial trauma,burn patients must endure a long journeyof healing that is often as painful as theoriginal injury itself. Daily wound care—the gentle cleaning and removal of deadtissue to prevent infection—can be so ex-cruciating that even the aggressive use ofopioids (morphine-related analgesics)

cannot control the pain.The patient’s healing

skin must be stretched topreserve its elasticity, to re-

duce muscle atrophy and toprevent the need for further

skin grafts. At these times,most patients—and especially

children—would love to trans-port their minds somewhere else

while doctors and nurses treattheir wounds. Working with the

staff at Harborview Burn Center inSeattle, Patterson and I set out in

1996 to determine whether immersivevirtual-reality techniques could be used

to distract patients from their pain. Theteam members include Sam R. Sharar,Mark Jensen and Rob Sweet of the Uni-versity of Washington School of Medi-cine, Gretchen J. Carrougher of Har-borview Burn Center and Thomas Fur-ness of the University of WashingtonHuman Interface Technology Laborato-ry (HITLab).

Pain has a strong psychological com-ponent. The same incoming pain signalcan be interpreted as more or less painfuldepending on what the patient is think-ing. In addition to influencing the way pa-tients interpret such signals, psychologi-cal factors can even influence the amountof pain signals allowed to enter the brain’scortex. Neurophysiologists Ronald Mel-zack and Patrick D. Wall developed this“gate control” theory of pain in the 1960s[see “The Tragedy of Needless Pain,” byRonald Melzack; Scient ifi c Amer ican,February 1990].

Introducing a distraction—for exam-ple, by having the patient listen to music—has long been known to help reduce painfor some people. Because virtual reality isa uniquely effective new form of distrac-tion, it makes an ideal candidate for paincontrol. To test this notion, we studiedtwo teenage boys who had suffered gaso-line burns. The first patient had a severeburn on his leg; the second had deep burnscovering one third of his body, includinghis face, neck, back, arms, hands and legs.Both had received skin-graft surgery andstaples to hold the grafts in place.

We performed the study during the re-moval of the staples from the skin grafts.

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The boys received their usual opioid med-ication before treatment. In addition,each teenager spent part of the treatmentsession immersed in a virtual-reality pro-gram and an equal amount of time play-ing a popular Nintendo video game (ei-ther Wave Race 64, a jet-ski racing game,or Mario Kart 64, a race-car game). Thevirtual-reality program, called Spider-World, had originally been developed asa tool to overcome spider phobias; weused it for this investigation because it

was the most distracting program avail-able at the time and because we knew itwould not induce nausea. Wearing astereoscopic, position-tracked headsetthat presented three-dimensional comput-er graphics, the patients experienced theillusion of wandering through a kitchen,complete with countertops, a windowand cabinets that could be opened. An im-age of a tarantula was set inside the vir-tual kitchen; the illusion was enhanced bysuspending a furry spider toy with wiggly

legs above the patient’s bed so that hecould actually feel the virtual spider.

Both teenagers reported severe to ex-cruciating pain while they were playingthe Nintendo games but noted largedrops in pain while immersed in Spider-World. (They rated the pain on a zero to100 scale immediately after each treat-ment session.) Although Nintendo canhold a healthy player’s attention for along time, the illusion of going inside thetwo-dimensional video game was found

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to be much weaker than the illusion of go-ing into virtual reality. A follow-up studyinvolving 12 patients at Harborview BurnCenter confirmed the results: patients us-ing traditional pain control (opioidsalone) said the pain was more than twiceas severe compared with when they wereinside SpiderWorld.

Why is virtual reality so effective in al-leviating pain? Human attention has beenlikened to a spotlight, allowing us to selectsome information to process and to ignoreeverything else, because there is a limit tohow many sources of information we canhandle at one time. While a patient is en-gaged in a virtual-reality program, thespotlight of his or her attention is nolonger focused on the wound and the painbut drawn into the virtual world. Becauseless attention is available to process in-coming pain signals, patients often expe-rience dramatic drops in how much painthey feel and spend much less time think-ing about their pain during wound care.

To increase the effec-tiveness of the virtual ther-

apy, our team created Snow-World, a program specifical-

ly customized for use withburn patients during wound

care. Developed with fundingfrom Microsoft co-founder Paul

G. Allen and the National Insti-tutes of Health, SnowWorld pro-

duces the illusion of flying throughan icy canyon with a frigid river and

waterfall, as snowflakes drift down[see illustration on pages 58 and 59].

Because patients often report that theyare reliving their original burn experienceduring wound care, we designed a glaciallandscape to help put out the fire. As pa-tients glide through the virtual canyon,they can shoot snowballs at snowmen,igloos, robots and penguins standing onnarrow ice shelves or floating in the riv-er. When hit by a snowball, the snowmenand igloos disappear in a puff of powder,the penguins flip upside down with aquack, and the robots collapse into aheap of metal.

More recent research has shown thatthe benefits of virtual-reality therapy arenot limited to burn patients. We con-ducted a study involving 22 healthy vol-unteers, each of whom had a blood pres-sure cuff tightly wrapped around one armfor 10 minutes. Every two minutes thesubjects rated the pain from the cuff; asexpected, the discomfort rose as the ses-sion wore on. But during the last two min-utes, each of the subjects participated intwo brief virtual-reality programs, Spi-

derWorld and ChocolateWorld. (In Choc-olateWorld, users see a virtual chocolatebar that is linked through a position sen-sor to an actual candy bar; as you eat thereal chocolate bar, bite marks appear onthe virtual bar as well.) The subjects re-ported that their pain dropped dramati-cally during the virtual-reality session.

What is more, improving the qualityof the virtual-reality system increases theamount of pain reduction. In anotherstudy, 39 healthy volunteers received athermal pain stimulus—delivered by anelectrically heated element applied to theright foot, at a preapproved temperatureindividually tailored to each participant—for 30 seconds. During this stimulus, 20of the subjects experienced the fully in-teractive version of SnowWorld with ahigh-quality headset, sound effects andhead tracking. The other 19 subjects sawa stripped-down program with a low-quality, see-through helmet, no sound ef-fects, no head tracking and no ability toshoot snowballs. We found a significantpositive correlation between the potencyof the illusion—how strongly the subjectsfelt they were immersed in the virtualworld—and the alleviation of their pain.

O F C O UR SE, all these studies relied onthe subjective evaluation of the pain by thepatients. As a stricter test of whether vir-tual reality reduces pain, I set out with mycolleagues at the University of Washing-ton—including Todd L. Richards, Aric R.Bills, Barbara A. Coda and Sam Sharar—to measure pain-related brain activity us-

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ing functional magnetic resonance imag-ing (fMRI). Healthy volunteers underwenta brain scan while receiving brief painstimulation through an electrically heatedelement applied to the foot. When the vol-unteers received the thermal stimuli with-out the distraction of virtual reality, theyreported severe pain intensity and un-pleasantness and spent most of the timethinking about their pain. And, as expect-ed, their fMRI scans showed a large in-crease in pain-related activity in five re-gions of the brain that are known to be in-volved in the perception of pain: theinsula, the thalamus, the primary and sec-ondary somatosensory cortex, and the af-fective division of the anterior cingulatecortex [see illustration on page 61].

Creating virtual-reality goggles thatcould be placed inside the fMRI machinewas a challenge. We had to develop afiber-optic headset constructed of non-ferrous, nonconducting materials thatwould not be affected by the powerfulmagnetic fields inside the fMRI tube. Butthe payoff was gratifying: we found thatwhen the volunteers engaged in Snow-World during the thermal stimuli, thepain-related activity in their brains de-creased significantly (and they also re-ported large reductions in subjective painratings). The fMRI results suggest thatvirtual reality is not just changing theway patients interpret incoming pain sig-nals; the programs actually reduce theamount of pain-related brain activity.

Encouraged by our results, two largeregional burn centers—the William Ran-dolph Hearst Burn Center at New YorkWeill Cornell Medical Center andShriners Hospital for Children in Galves-ton, Tex.—are both making preparationsto explore the use of SnowWorld for paincontrol during wound care for severeburns. Furthermore, the Hearst Burn Cen-ter, directed by Roger W. Yurt, is helpingto fund the development of a new upgrade,

SuperSnowWorld, which will feature life-like human avatars that will interact withthe patient. SuperSnowWorld will allowtwo people to enter the same virtualworld; for example, a burn patient and hismother would be able to see each other’savatars and work together to defeat mon-strous virtual insects and animated seacreatures rising from the icy river. By max-imizing the illusion and interactivity, theprogram will help patients focus their at-tention on the virtual world during par-ticularly long and painful wound care ses-sions. Now being built by Ari Hollander,an affiliate of HITLab, SuperSnowWorldwill be offered to medical centers free ofcharge by the Hearst and Harborviewburn centers.

Virtual-reality analgesia also has thepotential to reduce patient discomfortduring other medical procedures. BruceThomas and Emily Steele of the Universi-ty of South Australia have found that vir-

tual reality can alleviate pain in cerebralpalsy patients during physical therapy af-ter muscle and tendon surgery. (Aimed atimproving the patient’s ability to walk,this therapy involves exercises to stretchand strengthen the leg muscles.) Our teamat the University of Washington is ex-ploring the clinical use of virtual realityduring a painful urological procedurecalled a rigid cystoscopy. And we haveconducted a study showing that virtualreality can even relieve the pain and fearof dental work.

A N O T H E R T H E R A P E U T I C applica-tion of virtual reality is combating pho-bias by exposing patients to graphic sim-ulations of their greatest fears. This formof therapy was introduced in the 1990sby Barbara O. Rothbaum of Emory Uni-versity and Larry F. Hodges, now at theUniversity of North Carolina at Char-lotte, for treating fear of heights, fear offlying in airplanes, fear of public speak-ing, and chronic post-traumatic stressdisorder in Vietnam War veterans. Likethe pain-control programs, exposuretherapy helps to change the way peoplethink, behave and interpret information.

Working with Albert Carlin of HIT-

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Lab and Azucena Garcia-Palacios ofJaume I University in Spain (a HITLab af-filiate), our team has shown that virtual-reality exposure therapy is very effectivefor reducing spider phobia. Our first spi-der-phobia patient, nicknamed MissMuffet, had suffered from this anxiety dis-order for nearly 20 years and had acquireda number of obsessive-compulsive behav-iors. She routinely fumigated her car withsmoke and pesticides to get rid of spiders.Every night she sealed all her bedroomwindows with duct tape after scanning theroom for spiders. She searched for thearachnids wherever she went and avoidedwalkways where she might find one. Af-ter washing her clothes, she immediatelysealed them inside a plastic bag to makesure they remained free of spiders. Overthe years her condition grew worse.When her fear made her hesitant to leavehome, she finally sought therapy.

Like other kinds of exposure therapy,the virtual-reality treatment involves in-troducing the phobic person to the feared

object or situation a little at a time. Bit bybit the fear decreases, and the patient be-comes more comfortable. In our first ses-sions, the patient sees a virtual tarantulain a virtual kitchen and approaches asclose as possible to the arachnid while us-ing a handheld joystick to navigatethrough the three-dimensional scene. Thegoal is to come within arm’s reach of thevirtual spider.

During the following sessions, theparticipant wears a glove that tracks theposition of his or her hand, enabling thesoftware to create an image of a hand—the cyberhand—that can move throughthe virtual kitchen. The patient maneu-vers the cyberhand to touch the virtualspider, which is programmed to respondby making a brief noise and fleeing a fewinches. The patient then picks up a virtu-al vase with the cyberhand; when the pa-tient lets go, the vase remains in midair,but an animated spider with wiggling legscomes out. The spider drifts to the floorof the virtual kitchen, accompanied by a

brief sound effect from the classic horrormovie Psycho. Participants repeat eachtask until they report little anxiety. Thenthey move on to the next challenge. Thefinal therapy sessions add tactile feed-back to the virtual experience: a toy spi-der with an electromagnetic position sen-sor is suspended in front of the patient,allowing him or her to feel the furry ob-ject while touching the virtual spider withthe cyberhand.

After only 10 one-hour sessions, MissMuffet’s fear of spiders was greatly re-duced, and her obsessive-compulsive be-haviors also went away. Her success wasunusually dramatic: after treatment, shewas able to hold a live tarantula (whichcrawled partway up her arm) for severalminutes with little anxiety. In a subse-quent controlled study of 23 patients di-agnosed with clinical phobia, 83 percentreported a significant decrease in theirfear of spiders. Before treatment, thesepatients could not go within 10 feet of acaged tarantula without high anxiety; af-

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ter the virtual-reality therapy, most ofthem could walk right up to the cage andtouch its lid with only moderate anxiety.Some patients could even remove the lid.

Similar programs can be incorporat-ed into the treatment of a more seriouspsychological problem: post-traumaticstress disorder. The symptoms of PTSDinclude flashbacks of a traumatic event,intense reactions to anything symbolizingor resembling the event, avoidance be-haviors, emotional numbing, and irri-tability. It is a debilitating disorder that af-fects the patient’s social life and job per-formance and is much more challengingto treat than specific phobias. Cognitivebehavioral therapy protocols, such as theprolonged exposure therapy developedby University of Pennsylvania psycholo-gist Edna Foa, have a high success rate forpatients with PTSD. The exposure thera-py is thought to work by helping patientsprocess and eventually reduce the emo-tions associated with the memories of thetraumatic event. The therapist graduallyexposes the patient to stimuli that activatethese emotions and teaches the patienthow to manage the unwanted responses.

Researchers are now exploring wheth-er virtual-reality programs can be used tostandardize the therapy and improve theoutcome for patients, especially thosewho do not respond to traditional meth-ods. JoAnn Difede of Cornell Universityand I developed a virtual-reality exposuretherapy to treat a young woman who wasat the World Trade Center during theSeptember 11 attacks and later developedPTSD. During the therapy, the patient puton a virtual-reality helmet that showedvirtual jets flying over the towers andcrashing into them with animated explo-sions and sound effects. Although theprogress of the therapy was gradual andsystematic, the scenes presented by thesoftware in the final sessions were grue-somely realistic, with images of peoplejumping from the burning buildings andthe sounds of sirens and screams. Thesestimuli can help patients retrieve memo-ries of the event and, with the guidance ofa therapist, lower the discomfort of re-membering what happened.

Our first patient showed a large andstable reduction in her PTSD symptoms

and depression after the vir-tual-reality sessions. Otherpatients traumatized by thetower attacks are now beingtreated with virtual-reality ther-apy at Weill Cornell MedicalCollege and New York Presbyter-ian Hospital. I am also collaborat-ing with a team of researchers led byPatrice L. (Tamar) Weiss of HaifaUniversity in Israel and Garcia-Pala-cios to create a virtual-reality treatmentfor survivors of terrorist bombings whodevelop PTSD.

BE C AU SE D O Z E N S of studies have es-tablished the efficacy of virtual-realitytherapy for treating specific phobias, thisis one of the first medical applications tomake the leap to widespread clinical use.Virtually Better, a Decatur, Ga.–basedcompany that was co-founded by virtual-reality pioneers Hodges and Rothbaum,has produced programs designed to treatan array of anxiety disorders, includingfear of heights, fear of flying and fear ofpublic speaking. The company is leasing itssoftware to psychologists and psychiatristsfor $400 a month, allowing therapists toadminister the treatments in their own of-fices. A Spanish firm called PREVI offerssimilar programs. Instead of reclining ona couch, patients interactively confronttheir fears by riding in virtual airplanes orby standing in front of virtual audiences.

In contrast, more research is neededto determine whether virtual reality canenhance the treatment of PTSD. Scien-tists have not yet completed any ran-domized, controlled studies testing the ef-fectiveness of virtual-reality therapy fortreating the disorder. But some of theleading PTSD experts are beginning toexplore the virtues of the technology, andthe preliminary results are encouraging.

Large clinical trials are also needed to

determine the value of virtual-reality anal-gesia for burn patients. So far the researchhas shown that the SnowWorld programposes little risk and few side effects. Be-cause the patients use SnowWorld in ad-dition to traditional opioid medication,the subjects who see no benefit from vir-tual reality are essentially no worse offthan if they did not try it. Virtual realitymay eventually help to reduce reliance onopioids and allow more aggressive woundcare and physical therapy, which wouldspeed up recovery and cut medical costs.The high-quality virtual-reality systemsthat we recommend for treating extremepain are very expensive, but we are opti-mistic that breakthroughs in display tech-nologies over the next few years will low-er the cost of the headsets. Furthermore,patients undergoing less painful proce-dures, such as dental work, can use cheap-er, commercially available systems. (Pho-bia patients can also use the less expensiveheadsets.)

The illusions produced by these pro-grams are nowhere near as sophisticatedas the world portrayed in the Matrixfilms. Yet virtual reality has maturedenough so that it can be used to help peo-ple control their pain and overcome theirfears and traumatic memories. And asthe technology continues to advance, wecan expect even more remarkable appli-cations in the years to come.

MORE TO EXPLORE

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ATTACHMENT 3 A–9.3/211-16 Page 1 of 1 11/10/16

Immersive Virtual Reality: Additional Information for Board of Regents

http://www.gq.com/story/burning-man-sam-brown-jay-kirk-gq-february-2012

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/instead-painkillers-some-doctors-are-prescribing-virtual-reality-180959866/?no-ist

http://knkx.org/post/virtual-world-snow-and-ice-treats-pain

http://www.washington.edu/news/2006/10/05/snowworld-exhibit-to-open-at-smithsonians-cooper-hewitt-museum/

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/research/vrpain/index_files/UWMedicine.pdf

http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/24/14648057-groundbreaking-experiment-in-virtual-reality-uses-video-game-to-treat-pain

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/play-the-pain-away

Optional news articles below.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/a-virtual-reality-program-aims-to-ease-pain/

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/12/146775049/virtual-penguins-a-prescription-for-pain

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120638735

https://essentialhospitals.org/pokemon-go-helps-patients-heal/