Rizzo is best-known for his research using virtual reality to treat PTSD in veterans. It’s unclear when disease-altering treatments will arrive, so researchers are starting to look at ways that technology can enhance life and relieve some of the difficulties of caregiving. Millions of those individuals are facing another blow: Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia.
There are few Americans who do not have an aging family member, friend, neighbor or colleague living with health and mobility challenges that come with advancing years. Skip Rizzo’s mother takes a virtual tour of Rome. Instead of a phone call where you’re trying to figure out what to say when somebody isn’t engaging, it’s ‘Do you want to go to Rome?’ ‘Do you want to go to London today?’” “Now, imagine someone in a care facility across the country. He consulted with the medical device company Penumbra on the project. “When I did it the first time, I felt like I was having a conversation with someone in that location, walking around and doing stuff,” said Rizzo, director for medical virtual reality at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The killer feature is the ability to email a Zoom-like link from the headset itself - and voilà, the VR user has a companion for her travels, and the companion can share the view on their own device. It’s an elegantly simple thing - a VR headset preloaded with spherical video of the world’s great cities. She put on a virtual reality headset, and soon her face was aglow: “Oh! Carl and I used to love this little bar that was right over here.” The visuals brought back memories from 35 years ago when she visited Italy with her husband this time, Rizzo was right there with her, in a postage stamp-sized video off to one side. USC Research Professor Skip Rizzo thought his mother might like a trip to Rome.
0 kommentar(er)
