No cyberkinetosis for HypnoVR users
What is cyberkinetosis?
Cyberkinetosis is the motion sickness specific to virtual reality (VR) headset technology. Discomfort, sweating, drowsiness, migraine, and even nausea are symptoms related to this state of discomfort that can be experienced by a VR headset user. Pour expliquer cela, la théorie du conflit sensoriel est celle qui a le plus de sens : cette situation se produit lorsque les informations sensorielles sont contradictoires (divergence entre les systèmes oculaire et vestibulaire), que les sens ne reçoivent pas le retour habituel auquel le patient s’attendrait, et que le patient est donc désorienté. This lack of synchronisation is known in medical circles as “cyberkinetosis”.
This condition, which is often associated with travel sickness, can therefore affect an individual using virtual reality. However, it is not systematic, cyberkinetosis varies according to 3 basic aspects:
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the hardware
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The VR universe
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Patient’s feelings
Overall, therapeutic VR is associated with a low incidence of side effects ranging from 0 to 9.5%. However, to eliminate sensory conflict in VR, it is necessary to restore harmony between the body’s visual and vestibular systems so that users can experience immersive, safe and comfortable VR. This is because cyberkinetosis is not related to the notion of movement but to an inconsistency between the movement and the feeling of that movement.
Cyberkinetosis and the HypnoVR medical device
With HypnoVR, cyberkinetosis is almost non-existent and represents only 1.6% of healthy users (including nausea 0.8%), and 3% in patients who used HypnoVR during surgery or medical procedures (3 studies in adults and 1 in children did not find nausea)
In a postoperative study of major surgery with high doses of morphine, the use of HypnoVR in addition to analgesics resulted in a decrease in postoperative vomiting compared to analgesics alone.
These results obtained with HypnoVR should be compared with the results in the literature. The incidence of nausea/vomiting in surgery is approximately 30%. It is of multifactorial origin, linked to the patient, the type of anaesthesia and the analgesics, particularly morphine.
Our experience is thus specifically designed to integrate the techniques of a traditional medical hypnosis session with the quality of the architecture and sensory coherence of the proposed experience.
The very low rate of nausea observed with the HypnoVR headset in this intraoperative context is a testament to the quality of the architecture and the sensory coherence of the proposed experience. We thus ensure optimal comfort of use while integrating the hypnotic mechanisms useful for therapeutic effectiveness.