A new study indicates that, in some patients, the use of virtual reality devices could serve as a kind of analgesic.

A team of experts from the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of York St John, in the United Kingdom, has found that, under certain conditions, the use of virtual reality devices reduces the sensation of pain , so in the future it may be possible to adapt this technology to use it as a kind of non-pharmacological analgesic .

According to a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science , these researchers asked a group of volunteers to introduce one of their hands in a container with water at 1 ºC for as long as possible. Thus, they observed that when they wore a virtual reality device in which a game was played, their perception of pain was less and it took more seconds to remove the tip of the package. This effect increased even more when the virtual experience was more immersive, for example, if sound was added to the game and if the user was allowed to participate in the action.

Although it is not yet known with certainty how the physiological and psychological mechanisms involved in this phenomenon work , other previous experiments had already shown that the capacity of abstraction that videogames facilitate in certain circumstances allows to alleviate the physical and emotional pain, as if acting as a kind of distraction . In this work, the scientists point out that it is necessary to carry out more tests to check, for example, to what extent this technique could be effective in other conditions or the role played by the inclusion of sound in pain reduction.

• health
• technology
• videogames
• gaming
• games