We need help:

Children's Hospital Colorado (CHC) serves from the Mexican to the Canadian border via it's Flight for Life program [1] that air-lifts children and adults in dire need to the ICU in Aurora. One of the not so nice parts of a children's ICU ward, and ICU care in general, is the issue of ICU psychosis [2][3]. In short, to keep you alive after severe trauma physicians must run the risk of inducing mental trauma (please read the citations for further information). Children can also undergo ICU psychosis. To compensate, anti-depressants and pain medications are prescribed to lessen the mental trauma, but these drugs also have interactions with other drugs and are thought to prolong recovery.

Virtual Reality devices like the MS Hololens and the Occulus Rift may be able to help lessen the toll on these poor children by lessening the use of psychoactive drugs, increasing the rate of recovery, and decreasing the length of stay in critical care. AirBnB has a system like Google-Street view, but for apartment listings; you can take a virtual tour of the listing in VR and see if you like it. CHC could really use something like this for the kids.

Imagine you are a 7 year old. Your last memory before waking up in the ICU was your mother and father being killed in an automobile accident. You wake up surrounded by strange beeping machines, you are no longer breathing, there are tubes in every hole in your body pumping in and out vital fluids and gasses, the doctors may have even made new holes in you to keep your blood moving, you are restrained in the bed to keep you from tearing out these life-saving methods, you are likely drugged to deal with the pain and mostly incoherent. This is a nightmare for just about any person, but it is especially terrible for children. Many people come out of ICU care with PTSD, many children come out with PTSD. VR devices could allow these patients to 'take five' and return virtually to their homes via the AirBnB like systems. These children could run in their back-yards or play in their rooms again, if only for an hour.

C.S. Mott Children's Hospital in Michigan has run some pilot research with children [4] and the results are optimistic. The US Army has run some other pilot studies using VR for PTSD with returning Vets via the Bravemind program [5] and these results indicate success in using VR as a PTSD treatment. The limited results thus far indicate that VR in the ICU may be a viable method for recovery from severe trauma.

This is where we need your help, HackerNews. Children are suffering. We need hackers, programmers, and administrative people to help get VR devices into hospitals and determine the efficacy of using these devices as treatment. I am not a 'CS' person, not like you all are. We need your expertise. Honestly, we don't know what is going to happen in the end, but we have to give it a shot. The kids need for us to give it the ol' college try.

If you are interested in helping and have the time to dedicate, please email me (email is in my user-account). Thank you for reading this and for your time, we all appreciate it.

[1] https://www.childrenscolorado.org/doctors-and-departments/de...

[2]http://www.medicinenet.com/icu_psychosis/article.htm

[3]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/the-overl...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIgxRhz6lmM

[5] http://ict.usc.edu/prototypes/pts/