Jan. 19, 2023 — An emerging trend in virtual reality — incorporating scent — could be exciting news not just for gaming but for healthcare.
A growing number of hospitals across the country are using virtual reality to help patients manage pain, overcome phobias, and calm anxiety. Provider and Patient report mostly good results, except for the high price. VR therapy may start to become more common, especially if insurance companies start covering the cost.
But for all its potential in healthcare, there’s one area where VR still falls short: We still can’t smell it.
“[Smell] “It hasn’t been explored enough in virtual reality, but it’s worth exploring. The potential benefits are incredible,” said Dr. Judith Amores, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab.
Amores researched linking VR to smells to enhance human responses.exist an experiment, she had participants don VR headsets depicting calming natural scenes and a smart necklace she developed that emits the scent of lavender. When bursts of lavender were added to VR, participants reported feeling 26 percent more relaxed than when they had no scent. A device that monitored brain activity confirmed this: When a scent was added, the participants’ physiological responses increased by 25 percent.
The study was small (just 12 people), but Amores said it represents a direction that needs to be explored with more people in peer-reviewed research.A sort of 2022 System Review Research into virtual reality using multiple senses supports her: “The senses of smell and taste are still underexplored,” commenting, “and they could bring significant value to VR applications”—including health.
when we smell something, receptor cells in the nose send messages to the olfactory bulbs at the base of the brain. That information is sent to the amygdala and hippocampus, brain regions responsible for processing memory and emotions, Amores explained.
“Your sense of smell goes directly to the emotional centers of the brain,” says Amores. “This means you can really change how you feel based on what you smell.”
Smell, therefore, has the ability to immerse us more deeply in virtual reality, which could make VR therapy faster and more effective, Amores said.
New scent technology could move research forward
While medical research in this area may be slow to move, efforts by the entertainment industry may help move it forward. Amores said no VR systems that include scents are currently available, but that could change as soon as this year.
At the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this month, Vermont-based OVR Technology unveiled a headset with eight primary scents that can be combined into thousands of scents.The so-called ION3 is Scheduled for release later this year.
At the same time, a study published in International Journal of Human-Computer Research describes a scent machine that was tested using a virtual reality headset from tech giant HTC. Among other uses, the technique could help boost “smell training” for those who have lost their sense of smell due to COVID-19, the researchers say.
Boosting VR Therapy with Smell
Amores said scent-enhanced VR therapy could be explored for various clinical uses, such as treating anxiety disorders, sleep disorderand even Alzheimer’s disease (smell is linked to memory).
VR “exposure therapy” has been used to treat veterans with PTSD by immersing them in a virtual environment that triggers traumatic memories, desensitizing them so they know their thoughts are safe. An article in 2021 brain research Pointing out that the incorporation of smell into such therapies is “urgently needed” because smell can trigger traumatic memories, in some cases more strongly than sound. According to the paper, relaxing scents such as pine, eucalyptus or cinnamon can be gradually added or layered after distressing smells, such as diesel or burning, to reduce or even eliminate the trigger for the smell.
Those with addictions can also benefit from VR exposure therapy, learning to manage or resist cravings triggered by certain cues, some Research suggestion. VR has the ability to teleport them anywhere — like to a bar or a party — and the smell of booze or cigarettes might add the realism needed to trigger cravings.
Another application could be surgery preparation, Amores said. A patient completes a VR session with relaxing scents—for example, walking through a forest, breathing in pine and moss— Reduce preoperative anxietyand may reduce the amount of pain medication needed and improve outcomes.
These scents can be reused during hospitalization or recovery — with or without VR — to bring patients back to a calm state quickly. It’s a form of Pavlovian conditioning that’s easy to replicate, Amores says.
At Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, VR is being researched and used to help patients reduce pain for a variety of conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome and chronic low back pain.
Melissa Wong, MD, an obstetrician at Cedars-Sinai specializing in maternal-fetal medicine, has researched how VR can relieve pain and stress during labor and delivery, potentially delaying the use of epidurals.
“When it comes to pain, there is definitely a mind-body connection,” Wong said, “and the use of VR can take advantage of that.” She added that adding scents to make them more immersive could amplify these effects. Effect.
Amores predicts that as research continues to highlight the power of the sense of smell, we are likely to see this sense increasingly used in clinical treatments. It may not be long before “Smell-o-Vision” arrives at a hospital near you.
