Immersive Care: Enhancing care through virtual environments

The Immersive Care project (www.immersivecare.be), is lead by Thomas More University of Applied Sciences (Health & Care Challenges, Mobilab & Care, and Creative & Innovative Business) and funded by the Flemish government: Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO-TETRA). The project aims to create synergy between care providers and tech companies who aim to optimize the wellbeing of patients during their treatment or stay in a care facility. To do so, we make use of immersive technologies (ImT) such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and 360° videos. ImT create a sense of immersion in an artificial environment that replaces or changes (augments) the real environment, such that users get carried away (immersed) in a newly created environment. Accumulating evidence supports the use of ImT in multiple fields of healthcare. Therefore, in this project we aim to study the implementation of ImT in several Flemish healthcare settings, namely nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, paediatric hospital units and care facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities