Virtual Reality Reduces Phantom Pain in Paraplegics

Virtual Reality Reduces Phantom Pain in Paraplegics

The experimental setup involves a pair of dummy legs, a camera, virtual reality goggles, and two rods.

By EPFL10.31.17

"We managed to provoke an illusion: the illusion that the subject's legs were being lightly tapped, when in fact the subject was actually being tapped on the back, above the spinal cord lesion," explained Blanke, lead author of the study and holder of the Foundation Bertarelli Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics. "When we did this, the subjects also reported that their pain had diminished."
"We tapped the back of the subject near the shoulders and the subject experienced the illusion that the tapping originated from the paralyzed legs," explained Polona Požeg, co-author of the study and now neuroscientist at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV). "This is because the subject also received visual stimuli of dummy legs being tapped, viewed through the virtual reality headset, so the subject saw them immersively as his or her own legs."
The experimental setup involves a pair of dummy legs, a camera, virtual reality goggles, and two rods. The legs are filmed by a camera. In real-time, the video is relayed into virtual reality goggles worn by the paraplegic patient. The subject sees the dummy legs viewed from above, as if looking down on one's owns legs. With this setup in place, the scientist taps the patient's back with one rod while simultaneously tapping the dummy legs with the other.
"It takes about a minute of simultaneously tapping for the illusion to take place," said Blanke. "The tapping on the back gets translated onto the legs because the visual stimulus dominates over the tactile one."
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