Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Creating Ripple in Medical and Pharmaceutical World

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) emerged as a highly significant affordable and efficient approach in various sectors of health care and medicine such as surgery, diagnostic imaging, medical education, medical training, rehabilitation, nursing, telemedicine, palliative care, therapeutics, and patient care management. In virtual reality (VR), a user interacts and manipulates virtual objects of the virtual world with help of specialized VR devices like display screens. Augmented reality (AR) is a semi-true image, i.e., combination of a real scene viewed by a user and a virtual scene generated by a computer which augments the scene with additional information. The major applications of AR and VR in the healthcare sector are as in surgery, autism, diagnostic imaging, medical education and phantom limb pain, pharmaceuticals production, and so on. In early 1990s, VR technology was first utilized for visualizing medical data during surgery and also for pre-operatively planning surgical procedures. One of the major areas where this approach is highly promising is in plastic surgery and dental surgeries as surgery consequences are directly connected to the external appearance of the patient. Autism affects the nervous system and overall cognitive, emotional, social, and physical health of the person. It impairs the ability of patient to interact and communicate as a normal person. To overcome this issue, AR technology is used by “medical school of Stanford University” under the “Autism glass project.” They use Google Glass AR technology in order to help autistic children interpret others emotions and expecting them to build social relationship as normal people without the requirement of Google glass in future. AR and VR approach are widely used in diagnostic imaging such as in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scanning. The chief reasons for using AR and VR technology in diagnostic imaging are enhanced viewing, depth perception, and improvised human–machine interface (HMI). “Anatomage table” is a virtual anatomical table platform for anatomy studying and teaching where detailed structures of each part of human body can be visualized. This can also help in explaining a patient his/her pre-operative plan in order to make them understand their own surgical conditions better and thus improves patient compliance. Phantom pain sensations might include crushing, toe twisting, pins and needles, hot burning feel, etc. It is managed by using AR technology, and this approach lets the patients to see a virtual limb appearing on the screen which moves in the same way as the patient move their amputated limb. This helps in achieving a therapeutic effect by permitting a patient to control their amputated limb with their brain. This article is going to provide overviews on the various applications of AR and VR technology in medical field as well as pharmaceutical sector especially in pharmaceutical production and marketing domain. This is clearly evident that this approach has strong potential of emerging as a fundamental and highly efficient aspect of health care in future.