He may be an expert in virtual reality, but Assistant Professor Jon Ericson’s work has very real implications for the future of health care and its study at Bentley University.

Ericson, who arrived at Bentley in January 2017, is the architect behind Bentley’s new virtual and augmented reality lab, where students and researchers are able to create, explore, and manipulate virtual environments. Virtual reality, as a still-evolving technology, has applications for myriad industries, from architecture to social interaction to industrial design. But the health care space is where Ericson sees significant potential.

“Virtual reality is really powerful and has potential to improve many aspects of the health care process, directly or indirectly,” said Ericson. “By directly, I mean actually using virtual reality in a health care context. And then indirectly, I mean using virtual reality as a tool to help us develop better health care products, services, environments, and outcomes.”

The virtual and augmented reality lab is a 15x15 foot room housing a graphics computer that generates a headset’s computer displays. Layers of detail can be added and variables created to further make a student, researcher or participant feel like they are somewhere else, such as a hospital waiting room, complete with the relevant sounds and even other waiting patients.

“It is kind of amazing when you put the headset on, you sort of forget the physical world,” said Ericson.

The lab is set up and ready to run and Ericson meets with ten or so graduate students weekly to discuss their interests. Many, he says, are designers who want to develop the next generation of medical devices, interfaces and other products.  

But he's most excited about two areas of the health care industry where virtual reality, and the new Bentley lab, can make an impact.

The first is in hospital design. Ericson saw a need for it firsthand during a recent visit to a hospital. He noticed they had staff on hand at front desk to physically bring patients where they needed to go.

“If you’re older or if you’re coming in with a particular kind of issue or deficit, finding just how to get to your appointment is not trivial – where do you park, how do you get to the right office, how do you get there on time,” said Ericson. “There is an emerging field of patient experience, where hospitals are really trying to improve the experience.”

A hospital’s physical layout, design, decoration, and even signage can influence a patient’s ability to get the care they need. And virtual reality can play a critical role in helping architects and designers create a more user-friendly environment. With virtual reality, they can prototype a design before actually building the hospital, and test variables to see how patients would move, interact, and learn in the future facility.

For example, Ericson described putting a virtual reality headset on a research participant and have that person virtually walk around and interact with a hospital. Researchers can use the data to predict how patients might navigate the real facility. 

“How do we build the best wayfinding system for people?” said Ericson. “It sounds like it’s not the most important thing, in the sense that they’re there for a health problem, but it impacts their experience and ability to get the care that they need.”

Educationally, students can design certain aspects of a hospital waiting room, like a display screen or even lighting, and then use the virtual reality lab to input their product and test its effectiveness. They can examine everything from a display’s usability to an overabundance of surface area that could collect pathogens.

On March 14, 2018, an architecture firm, e4h Environments for Health Architecture, will visit Bentley to participate in a seminar hosted by the Health Thought Leadership Network entitled, “The Use of Virtual Reality in Healthcare,” where they will discuss possible research and study directions that could better identify virtual reality’s place in the hospital design industry.

In addition to the architectural application, Ericson wants to explore the therapeutic benefits of virtual reality.

He cited work done by colleagues with burn victims. To deal with the pain of having bandages changed, burn victims typically use interventions like medicine or distraction. But researchers had burn victims play a virtual reality video game in which they threw snowballs in an artificially icy environment in hopes of counteracting the physical and psychological pain. Ericson envisions examining this application of the technology even further, adding more layers of detail to help patients deal with various medical conditions.

“Don’t think of virtual reality as just being a headset on your face. I think of it as being a subset of a larger idea,” said Ericson. “You can leverage all of the human sensory systems and create an experience that really cuts across all of those senses in the context of medicine.”

He also suggested opportunities for surgeons to utilize virtual reality technology.

As a neurology and physiology major at the University of Connecticut, Ericson had an interest in health care early on, potentially seeing himself as a researcher or physician. After working in several biology and neuroscience labs, his interests evolved, shifting his work towards psychology and cognitive learning.

But it was during his graduate experience at Brown University when Ericson merged his unique background with the world of virtual reality. Working in Brown’s world-renowned Virtual Environment Navigation Laboratory (VENLab), he recognized the remarkable potential virtual reality possessed as a teaching, research, and development tool. Years later, Brown’s VENLab, and Ericson’s extensive experience there, would provide the inspiration for the similar facility here at Bentley.

Ericson’s experience at Brown provided in-depth knowledge about what a virtual reality lab could do, as well as how to mitigate the risks involved, such as motion sickness or other physical discomfort. 

He has seen the evolution of virtual reality, from clunky, expensive headsets to the more streamlined, accessible technology we see in the consumer world.

“Virtual reality research is really exploding and accelerating at an incredible rate, very much driven by the fact that it has suddenly become a widely available consumer technology,” he said. “That means it is being applied in so many ways, so fast.”

But Ericson is also aware that he is in the midst of a still developing field, one in which he, his students, and Bentley University all have an opportunity to lead.

“Virtual Reality has a lot of good potential and it has a lot of potential that we don’t understand,” Ericson said. “People are basically talking a lot about how can we use it. I am much more interested in how should we use it. I see health care as one of those, if not the major area, where it has the most positive and exciting potential.”