Virtual Reality in Healthcare

Abstract

Over the past few years, the rapid development of virtual reality has led to the technology finding its way into the professional sector in addition to the gaming market. It plays a particularly important role in medical applications by providing a virtual environment to enable therapy, rehabilitation, and serving as an educational platform. The chapter provides an overview of the applications of virtual reality in medicine about some of the most important areas. Both scenario development and application validation methods are presented, as well as their impact on the end user. Finally, the technological potential and future development of VR applications used for improving medical service delivery are summarized and briefly discussed.