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Apple’s Vision Pro headset could be a healthcare game-changer, using virtual and augmented reality to enhance treatment and monitoring

  • Virtual reality can improve healthcare in many ways, from sharing and displaying information to helping treat post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Apple’s Vision Pro headset is being tested in a number of areas and shows great potential for multi-patient monitoring and surgical operations

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A customer with an Apple Vision Pro mixed reality  headset at the company’s store in Palo Alto, California, US. The new headset is being tested in a number of areas of health care, and shows great potential for monitoring patients and sharing information. Photo: Bloomberg

Newly released to the public, Apple’s Vision Pro headset can already be used to display medical records, filling a doctor’s field of view with anything from graphs of a patient’s blood pressure over time to their latest chest X-ray.

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The expensive new technology, with its ultra-high-resolution screens for each eye and multiple cameras for hand and eye tracking, brings a new level of precision to a realm that has mainly been the domain of video games.

It remains to be seen whether Apple’s latest innovations will have what it takes to usher in a new era of virtual reality in healthcare, but the new Spatial Computing Centre of Excellence now getting under way at Sharp HealthCare in the US city of San Diego aims to find out.

Sharp just took delivery of 30 Vision Pro sets, giving them to healthcare workers in various positions.

YouTuber IJustine with the Apple Vision Pro headset in an Apple Store during its launch in Los Angeles, California. Photo: EPA-EFE
YouTuber IJustine with the Apple Vision Pro headset in an Apple Store during its launch in Los Angeles, California. Photo: EPA-EFE

Apple is pitching this new product as a spatial computing device, one capable of projecting one’s digital work and entertainment across a broad virtual landscape, either transporting a person to a digital domain or overlaying information on a person’s immediate surroundings.

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