The Potential of Extended Reality in the Health Care and Manufacturing Sectors

Thursday - September 28 2023, 20:16 UTC - 1 year ago

The EU funded TACTILITY project has found that extended reality has enormous potential for sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing and gaming. The project developed a glove that simulates the sense of touch, and allows people to feel virtual objects and creatures. This opens up possibilities of using the technology for treatments of phobias, as well as helping operators to learn how to assemble complex machines. Evidence from the project bolsters the European Commission's efforts to develop the virtual-worlds domain.

Touch sensations are improving to help sectors like health care and manufacturing, while other advances are being driven by the gaming industry.Imagine a single technology that could help a robot perform safety checks at a nuclear plant, cure a person's arachnophobia and simulate the feeling of a hug from a distant relative.

Welcome to the world of "extended reality." Researchers funded by the EU have sought to demonstrate its enormous potential.

Relevant research .

Their goal was to make augmented reality, in which the real world is digitally enhanced, and virtual reality—a fully computer-generated environment—more immersive for users.

One of the researchers, Erik Hernandez Jimenez, never imagined the immediate relevance of a project that he led when it started in mid-2019. Within a year, the COVID-19 pandemic had triggered countless lockdowns that left people working and socializing through video connections from home.

"We thought about how to apply this technology, how to feel human touch even at a distance, when we were all locked at home and contact with others was through a computer," said Hernandez Jimenez.

He coordinated the EU research initiative, which was named TACTILITY and ran from July 2019 until the end of September 2022.

The TACTILITY team developed a glove that simulates the sense of touch. Users have the sensation of touching virtual objects through electrical pulses delivered by electrodes embedded in the glove.

The sensations range from pushing a button and feeling pressure on the finger to handling a solid object and feeling its shape, dimensions and texture.

Glove and suit .

"TACTILITY is about including tactile feedback in a virtual-reality scenario," said Hernandez Jimenez, who is a project manager at Spanish research institute TECNALIA.

He said the principle could be extended from the glove to a whole body suit.

Compared with past attempts to simulate touch sensations with motors, the electro-tactile feedback technique produces a more realistic result at a lower cost, according to Hernandez Jimenez.

This opens up the possibility of making the technology more widely accessible.

The research bolsters European Commission efforts to develop the virtual-worlds domain, which could provide 860,000 new jobs in Europe this decade as the worldwide sector grows from €27 billion in 2022.

The EU has around 3,700 companies, research organizations and governmental bodies that operate in this sphere, according to the Commission.

Phobias to factories .

The TACTILITY researchers looked at potential health care applications.

That's where spiders come into the picture. They were among the objects in the project's experiments to mimic touch.

"One that was quite impressive—although I didn't like it at all—was feeling a spider or a cockroach crawling over your hand," Hernandez Jimenez said.

A potential use for the technology is treating phobias through exposure therapy in which patients are gradually desensitized to the source of their fear. That could start by virtually "touching" cartoon-like creepy crawlies before progressing to more lifelike versions.

The tactile glove can also be used in the manufaturing sector. It can help operators learn how to assemble complex machines.