Partnering with a Unity Agency to Build Custom VR Healthcare Experiences

After defence, healthcare is the major expenditure sector in the world. In 2023, healthcare provisions in the UK cost nearly £300 billion, and it continues to rise year on year. While the majority of that money is spent on infrastructure, medicines, and salaries, a good proportion is used on the delivery of non-invasive medicine techniques such as illness investigation, diagnosis, and post-diagnosis counselling.  

Obviously, everyday medicine such as accident and emergency, ongoing care and surgical operations need to be carried out on the patient within a hospital environment, the others are more flexible. And that is becoming a major area where technology can be used and money can be saved.

Conversational-based interventions and treatment can be carried out by telephone, but the rapid growth of VR systems means that these kinds of interaction can have the added dimension of including visualisations and avatar-based connections. Medical VR systems are not only more efficient and inclusive than telephone calls, but they also have the potential to save the NHS billions of pounds.

VR: The Modern Solution

Medical-based VR systems use immersive computer-generated environments to train medical professionals, diagnose conditions, and even treat patients, all while providing a risk-free learning or treatment experience. VR headsets or displays, along with motion controllers and sensors, create a simulation where users can interact with virtual objects and characters, mimicking real-life scenarios. This allows training to be realistic and relevant. 

Medical consultants are typically very busy and spread very thinly throughout the industry, with a number of medical institutions needing cover by them. With huge workloads to attend to and a general decentralisation of resources ongoing, simply being able to meet with patients in a face-to-face way becomes a huge and unwieldy task. 

The logistics of a consultant or senior doctor being available at a hospital local to a patient is increasingly unlikely, leaving telephone appointments as the only real option. However, with the advent of relatively cheap VR headsets, there is now a new and exciting option that can help consultants and staff meet and interact with patients. 

The development of suitable VR environments becomes the main barrier to this virtual delivery, but with a growing number of professional developers, adept in creating bespoke online worlds, having the right virtual rooms is also fairly straightforward. Most expert VR designers tend to use the Unity package because it has a number of distinct advantages when it comes to creating virtual environments needed for consultations.

The Unity software package is an increasingly popular choice for VR creation owing to its user-friendly interface, extensive community support, and diverse set of VR-specific capabilities. It also has a large in-package asset store, multiple in-depth tutorials, and collaborative options to help with the VR production process. Unity’s adaptability enables developers to design and construct professional 2D and 3D VR experiences, making it an adaptable tool for a variety of project kinds.

Training Made Easy

But VR can be used for more than just patient interaction virtual rooms and this may be an area in which it can really make an impact in the medical world. Medical training is often complex to arrange and expensive to deliver. Because of the invasive nature of many procedures, and the need to utilise subject experts, training sessions are uniquely expensive and difficult to organise. Getting the right people in the same room under the right circumstances can mean months of planning.  

However, imagine having the same training carried out using virtual models in a remote theatre, and having the trainer being able to engage with students from all over the world and from their own living or work space. This is the new order that VR can bring to any training session, but will have a huge positive impact on medical training and healthcare experiences.

Just as with the design of virtual rooms for consultations and follow-up discussions, even complex training scenarios can be developed within the Unity software with relative ease. Key to making a realistic and engaging training is the need to work with a dedicated Unity Developer to help design and implement the package. While there are many Unity Agencies in the market for creating training packages, Unity Developers is one of the stand-out businesses.

Your New Training Development Partner

Unity Developers have a dedicated team of developers, designers, and 3D artists with the background and experience to be able to create the perfect custom VR solution for healthcare and medical Unity applications. The process starts with a specification of what is required and an understanding of what would be required of the Unity software to achieve that. Once the team and the client have agreed on the parameters, the technical team will begin making a tailor-made solution, be it for an online consultation room, or a detailed and specific training package. 

The team is proficient in the development of packages that are compatible with all main platforms, such as iOS, Android, Apple VisionOS, Meta Quest, Windows, Web, HTC Vive, Hololens, ARKit, and ARCore. Unity Developers are capable of creating a professional application that is compatible with any hardware that is submitted.

Unity Developers pride themselves on working with the client and creating exactly what the client wants, and communicating with them at all times. Once the project has been fully developed, tested, and has been released, Unity Developers will continue to work with you in a training and support role.

Unity Developers are your best App-design and implementation partners. Why not contact them and see how they can help with your consultation, training and medical Unity applications and requirements.