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Over the past few years, information technologies have been able to create a unique environment to provide resources for the development of digital medicine (Gansel, Melissa, Belkum, 2019), which allows remote communication on health issues with the population. This phenomenon has become especially relevant in conditions of forced self-isolation of citizens due to the spread of novel coronavirus COVID-19 (Yu, 2020). Under such conditions, the population is in greatest demand for products and system solutions to organize medical care providing video broadcast, storage and transmission of medical data. Modern information technologies have allowed both a doctor and a patient to quickly interact with each other at a remote distance in real time.
E-mail, instant messaging, Wi-Fi, and software and hardware for the development of popular medical applications and preventive medicine technologies have become a leader in on-demand services market.
The proliferation of wearable electronic medical devices and virtual reality technologies are considered the main factors to ensure positive dynamics in the development of digital medicine.
Development of microprocessor technology, improvement of methods and means for measurement information recording, processing and transfer, and development in the field of artificial intelligence and human-machine interfaces have led to the creation of a new generation of tools and mechanisms for perceiving the real world via conditionally virtual events.
Virtual reality (VR) is a technically constructed interactive environment that allows the user to immerse into a virtual world and act therein via special sensors and programs. Wherein, visual, auditory, tactual, motor, and other user perceptions are replaced by imitation or simulation (Gigante, 1993).
Back in 1996, Rosen J. (Rosen, Laub, Soltanian, Redett, 1996) clearly formulated the development areas for VR hardware and software in the 21st century, having noted the most promising areas of its implementation in the educational process, modeling of various objects and textures, as well as in the remote control of robotics simulators in engineering and medical applications (Figure 1).
Figure 1.
VR applications according to Rosen J. (1996)
Currently, the market for virtual devices is formed by the following manufacturers: Epson BT-200, Google Glass, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Microsoft Hololens, Lumus dk-32, Samsung GearVR, Facebook, Sony, Nokia, etc. Publication and patent activities of these companies allows us to distinguish the four groups of manufacturers, being characterized as centers for novel VR knowledge growth, sustainable research centers, dynamically developing R&D divisions and research engineers. The leading countries in this field are researchers from the United States (46% of the intellectual property market), China (34% of the intellectual property market), Japan (19% of the intellectual property market), and South Korea (13% of the intellectual property market). Russia occupies about 3% of the global intellectual property market in the VR segment (Safronov, Kuzmin, Bodin, Baranov, Trofimov, Tychkov, 2019).
The market of virtual technologies and simulators in the healthcare sector is widely represented by products for laparoscopy, treatment of senile dementia and strokes, relief of fears and pain syndromes, navigation and tactile connections of organs and tissues, etc.
A generalized block diagram for information transfer in VR systems is shown in Figure 2. The presented structure consists of:
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Nodes for constructing VR scene models (models, scenarios, and their positioning in the environment).
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Nodes for information transfer via physiological interfaces (sight, hearing, and touch).
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Nodes for information receiving via special sensors of the user’s body position.
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Nodes for controlling the user’s state and parametric sensors in the positioning system via specialized data and knowledge bases on physiological, physical, and psycho-emotional state of the user.