Scope

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has undergone a transition in the last 25 years taking it from the realm of expensive toy into that of functional technology. This has led to new opportunities for VR and other variants of computer-based technologies (augmented reality, mixed reality, telemedicine, mobile apps, artificially intelligent virtual human agents, etc.) to have a large impact on the future of medical research, assessment, and practice. Since the mid-1990s, VR-based testing, training, teaching, and treatment approaches have been developed by clinicians and researchers that would be difficult, if not impossible, to deliver using traditional methods. During this time, a large (but still maturing) scientific literature has evolved investigating clinical and research uses of VR with both healthy and clinical populations. VR affords the opportunity to create highly realistic, interactive, and systematically controllable stimulus environments that users can be immersed in, and interact with, for human performance measurement and training, as well as clinical assessment and intervention. This “Ultimate Skinner Box” perspective makes VR well matched to research and clinical questions of relevance in medicine, psychology, social work, physical/occupational therapy (and other allied health disciplines) beyond leveraging computing simply for the automation of processes. Moreover, continuing advances in the underlying enabling technologies for creating and delivering VR applications have resulted in its widespread availability as a consumer product, sometimes at a very low cost. 

This section invites submission of publications aiming at improving existing research methodologies and we welcome theoretical/conceptual papers concerned with formal models and analyses and the multidisciplinary use of virtual reality and associated technologies to provide new insights into clinical research and practice. We encourage submissions on leading edge research findings of all aspects of medical, mental health, and rehabilitation simulation technology approaches including (but not limited to): 

• surgical and clinical training,

• assessment and treatment across a wide range of clinical health conditions,

• methodologies to promote access and engagement in healthcare, and generally the evolution and promotion of evidence-based and patient-centered models of care delivery.

Submission

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