VR Therapy Tools Key to Mental Health, Hatsumi Says

Two entrepreneurs discussed the value of VR healthcare in an exclusive talk at the ISE 2022 Barcelona

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Hatsumi Tiger Heart
Mixed RealityLatest News

Published: May 16, 2022

Demond Cureton

The XR community currently hosts an amazing list of global talent across many specialities and disciplines, many of whom have unique journeys leading them to their current work in the industry.

Their personal stories and challenges remain an inspiration to those seeking to follow their own paths as entrepreneurs in a burgeoning market of emerging technologies, which are on the rise and in demand.

Sarah Ticho, Founder of Hatsumi VR and Co-Founder of the XR Healthcare Alliance, shared her story on her entry to XR and its holistic therapeutic capabilities in a special podcast with Sanj Surati, Founder of Tiger Heart, a digital atelier based in London, at the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2022 event in Barcelona, Spain.

The Road to Recovery

Ticho’s entry into VR health followed a tragic family event while she was finishing her degree, triggering a dramatic shift in life priorities. She began to explore conversations with people at art installations at the Fabrica Gallery in Brighton, leading to a brief tenure as an office manager there.

The gallery’s site-specific installations introduced her to immersive art as well as workshops, panel discussions, and additional events related to numerous contemporary themes, she explained.

A brief struggle with mental health forced her to seek help from medical professionals, but Ticho felt they failed to communicate properly or offer a viable solution.

Speaking on her experience, she said,

“I started to see the doctor’s office was like a performance space, where you have a short amount of time to describe what’s happened to you, and then they need to send you down like the right pathway. An interesting statistic is that [it takes] on average of about 11 seconds to convey your condition to a doctor before you’ll be interrupted”

Her interest in VR was piqued after seeking ways to build empathy with storytelling, where VR headsets would allow people to “show the world through somebody else’s lens.”

She explained how firms used VR healthcare for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), exposure therapy, practising mindfulness, pain management, and other therapies for mental health patients.

Creative Expression

When asked about the creative medium of VR used in mental health and wellness therapies, Ticho discussed an organisation with the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who hosted a mental health and fine arts event called the Big Anxiety Festival where she entered as a VR curator to host an exhibition on how the technology could improve mental well-being.


While there, she met a researcher involved in body mapping, which allowed people to illustrate their own experiences with mental illness using mindfulness.

Sarah told Tiger Heart,

“I’ve been playing around with VR for a while and I came across these amazing 3D drawing experiences like Google’s Tilt Brush, and I love the idea that you could float through space and paint with fire. I became interested in how you can translate this into a VR experience so that you could draw on the skin or inside the body, or even outside the body as well”

Ticho’s venture into VR healthcare tools provided patients with fresh ways to communicate their experiences to doctors, she said.

According to the exec, her platform Hatsumi helped people feel “better understood” so that doctors could reach a more accurate and faster diagnosis along with “more standardised, quantitative measures,” in addition to increasing public engagement.

Further collaborative work with Dutch artist Monobanda led to an immersive experience for children, where they could interact with their own artworks. The children’s creations also formed a “terracotta army of human emotion” in a virtual procession of creative content.

A School of Fish? Funding Challenges in XR Healthcare

When asked by Surati about the challenges of her initiatives and how they were overcome, Ticho said that the process to receive funding for launching such projects was “complicated,” namely from patrons such as the National Health Service (NHS) and others.

She discussed how her efforts to receive funding from the NHS and other organisations led her to co-found the XR Healthcare Alliance, due to the fragmented nature of available opportunities.

“I think someone described it really well, that everyone thinks that the NHS is like this big whale, but it’s actually a school of fish, and [VR is] a new technology that’s completely unregulated and that people don’t understand”

Ticho began to network with Immerse UK, a British organisation backing the immersive tech industry, and the exec later discovered that the fragmented industry needed leaders to guide the direction of the sector’s development across academic, tech firms, and content creators.

She had previously worked with the organisation as their Healthcare Lead and hosted several conferences, roundtables, and a national touring series.

Her mission with the XR Healthcare Alliance was to determine “how you bring all these different people together,” she said, adding it aimed to build an XR strategy with several key organisations, including the NHS, Health Education England, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and StoryFutures.

Colleagues from the XR Health Alliance, including Immerse UK Founder Fiona Kilkelly and Ross O’Brien, Former NHS healthcare professional, contributed immensely to the organisation’s solutions, which supported psychological healthcare for the Grenfell Wellbeing Service (GWS).

O’Brien and his work with the GWS and The Fred Company eventually created the foundation for the VR hub that provided greater uptake for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services.

The XRHA later deployed VR hubs facilitated by psychologists, where people could experiment with therapeutic games as well as share their experiences.

The 4-day ISE 2022 Barcelona concluded on 13 May at the Fira de Barcelona Gran Via, where hundreds of tech companies across the audiovisual and XR industries gathered and featured some of the world’s biggest tech brands such as Zoom, Google, Lenovo, Varjo, Microsoft, Samsung, Sony, and many others.

Futurist and XR Star podcaster Amelia Kallman also hosted panel talks with top execs for the Smart Workplace Summit, and keynote speakers such as award-winning AI artist Refik Anadol and Illuminarium Founder and CEO Alan Greenburg also addressed audiences at the ISE 2022.

 

 

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