Creating Empathy with Technology
Do you ever feel like your doctor just doesn't understand how you feel, no matter how you try to explain it? You're trying to describe the worst pain in your life and they tell you to take two Tylenol? Or maybe you have a condition that's difficult to describe to someone who has never been through it, and you need your doctor to understand the severity.
Well, help may be on the way. I've been reading about how researchers are developing ways to help health care provider experience what their patients are going through—using technology. Through machine simulators, multi-player games, and low-tech equipment, care providers can now learn what it is like to live heart failure, experience the visual decline toward blindness, be disabled by a stroke, and with schizophrenia. There is even a Virtual Dementia Tour Kit to give people a sense of what it is like to struggle with diseases of aging.
The goal of all of these simulators is to generate empathy in the user that, hopefully, leads to improvements in patient care. Advances in technology give researchers more tools for these simulations, so I think we can only expect more along these lines. I must say that I'm excited to see what researchers will come up with next. To everyone who thought technology was cold and heartless, soon you may need to re-think your point-of-view!
My question: Is anyone going to climb into a Migraine Simulator willingly? Frankly, I think they'll just opt to take our word for it.
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