Essential healthcare employees in a Missouri hospital are being offered the opportunity to relieve stress caused by work using virtual reality.
Boone Hospital and Healium, a company focused on bettering mental fitness using technology, are working together to provide their hospital workers access to a new VR system that brings the employees to less stressful settings.
“Healium is a digital drug that’s powered by consumer wearables, so anything that captures data like a smart watch or a brain sensing headband,” said Helium CEO, Sarah Hill, in conversation with news channel KRCG. “We’re using that to control virtual worlds to take the mystery out of meditation.”
The device was first tested on 100 Boone Hospital workers in a clinical trial. Over the course of a few months, nurses and other staff members were given a virtual reality headset to wear as well as an EEG headband. Through this headband, the conductors of the study were able to record the participants’ heart rate and sensations of the brain to examine the brain patterns that are linked to stress.
With the equipment on, the employees taking part in the study were allowed to choose a simulation depicting soothing, natural scenery such as the woods or a meadow. Using each research participants’ individual biometric information, the scenery changed based on the user’s stress level.
If the headset recorded an increase in stress levels based on the brain patterns being tracked, the user’s simulation morphed from the one they were into one they responded to more positively such as a walk down the beach.
Participants were able to understand their own mood patterns by tracking their own stress levels using a firefly depicted on the screen. As they watched the firefly and scenery change, the users were able to learn how to control their own stress levels.
Overall, the results of the study were largely positive as they proved to have a significant impact on stress. In just four minutes, the participants were instantly put into a better mood with levels of happiness and calmness increasing notably. With the new device now available to the workers, the hospital says that it’s motivating their employees to focus more on their mental health and spend some time on themselves.
“I think it’s a great thing it’s just actually getting the coworkers to take a break,” said Michelle Sprague, a nurse manager at the hospital, to KRCG. “It kind of opened our eyes to needing to do more about self care.”
Healium developed the device after the COVID-19 pandemic forced healthcare workers to take on a more prominent role. A 2020 study conducted during the height of the pandemic found that 93% out of 1,119 healthcare workers experienced high levels of stress. 75% of those asked also reported feeling overwhelmed while another 68% percent reported feeling physically exhausted.
“It’s important to identify and advance stress-management approaches that can be implemented within a healthcare environment,” said a spokesperson on the company’s website. “ Healium, provided through a portable virtual reality device, may be an ideal match for this need.”
