Virtual Reality as Cost Effective Tool for Distance Healthcare

VR can provide a rich, interactive environment in distance assisted actions for serious games in healthcare. The location-based decisions can be transferred for distance-based assisted decisions, when the specialists cannot be present in time at the probe/case location. The specialists can consult at distance, a probe in the real lab, by using images that are taken with high resolution cameras and that are sent over the internet. In advanced healthcare the virtual environment is conducted by a surgeon and decision is transmitted to a robotic instrument that mimics the actions. In this case the cost effective solution refers to regular healthcare activity such as visual assisted diagnosis in real time, training of the specialists, assessing a situation and give an expert opinion on it, future actions and treatment. The advancement in technology allowed VR systems to run on personal computers thus decreasing the implementation cost for a sophisticated system. In the present implementation, a cost-effective solution is presented. The solution is easy to use by the medical specialists and is helpful to compensate the time-delay for the doctor mobility at the probe/case location. A user-friendly interface was developed in order to facilitate the communication between a specialist in the lab and the expert at distance, using the immersive technology of VR, in order to replicates an environment via computer-simulated reality.