There is so much we don’t understand about our brain. In our everyday lives, wearables are giving us body and brain insights, such as quality of sleep and blood pressure. But having access to deeper cognitive insights are reserved to the medical field. What if there was a better and easier way? Modern VR headsets are the key as they can recreate life-like environments and provide neuropsychological insights. With them, we can help understand neurological diseases and raise awareness on understanding cognitive processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We as a society have grown accustomed to wearables for years – whether you love them or hate them, fitness trackers in any shape or form are worn by many curious individuals who want to understand their own health<\/strong> in a more continuous way and outside the traditional doctor-patient setting. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Seamlessly embedded in an ecosystem of already existing devices (smartphones) and apps, wearables such as the Apple Watch have begun providing insights to their users in ways never before thought possible. Apart from their general utility in terms of productivity management, wearables today can measure blood pressure and saturation, sleep quality and activity patterns and are even starting to predict potential cardiovascular health hazards down the road because of that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we could gain the same insights – in a continuous and non-invasive way – for how we think, how we process thoughts, how our memory works<\/strong> and how our cognitive load affects our attention, output and, eventually, mental and neurological health? According to SOMAREALITY<\/a>, a Viennese start-up that creates digital biomarkers based on eye-tracking<\/a>, it’s not a question of “if” but only a question of “when”. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Neurological monitoring is a powerful means to assess various cognitive functions and is traditionally performed in a laboratory, medical or clinical environment. Outside of those settings, no patient or user has access to it, requiring a 1:1 doctor-patient setup to get an understanding of one’s cognitive state. And even then, only a single snapshot is produced that cannot be benchmarked with arbitrary data from the same point in time last year, let alone last month or last night. While the Oura Ring, a wellness wearable that has gained notable attention in the last two years, is already measuring quality of sleep to a degree that allows it to translate those findings into concrete daily suggestions for how a user should go about their day, we lack a similar solution for our neurological and psychological state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n True, you can self-measure and track certain processes and thereby map, for instance, cognitive decline, over a period of time, just like you can subjectively measure pain and moods. However, there is no solution for seamless and continuous neurological monitoring<\/strong> on the market that provides an actual solution – one that addresses core issues like objectivity, clinical and technical validity, and scalability – from an end-user’s as well as a researcher’s or clinician’s point of view. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nWearables are dead, long live VR!<\/h2>\n\n\n\n