14 DAY TRIAL // You'd never believe it but the video games eventually proved to be more analgesic than drugs. A study carried out by Diane Gromala, associate professor at SFU's School of Interactive Arts and Technology has revealed that "subjects who are distracted in fully immersive virtual reality (VR) environments feel less pain than their counterparts on drug-based pain treatments."
Diane Gromala is founding director of SFU's BioMedia Lab, but she also suffers from chronic pain. Her goal is to find new ways to use computer technologies to help people improve their own health outcomes through education, experience, and physical expressiveness, according to sfu.ca.
And since experiments went so well in proving that subjects who were distracted in VR environments felt less pain than their "drugged" counterparts, Diane decided to devote a great part of her research "to understanding how VR goggles and headsets can be used to help relieve pain," according to the same website. "I'm also working on improved computerized meditation and visualization therapy aids," professor Gromala added.
Her studies also revealed that as many as one in five Canadians experiences chronic pain, while they must wait an average of two to five years to see a pain specialist. Thus, "there is a real demand for this kind of therapy," says Diane.
"As Canada's baby-boomers enter old age, pain management looms as a huge public-health issue. Controlling pain through computerized VR and biofeedback meditation therapies has the promise of providing successful, cost-effective alternatives to pain medications," she concludes.
Currently the professor is working close with physicians on novel computerized biofeedback therapies to give a way to express, visualize and keep track of the sufferers' pain. VR also acts as a good time killer, aside its distracting characteristics, for those who have to wait a lot of time until they can actually see someone about their chronic pain.