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Embodied Labs Alzheimers Training: Empowering Thoughtful Caretakers

Starting from a very low-tech mockup made from tape and safety glasses, Embodied Labs has created their Alzheimers training resource to teach caregivers of both professional and family varieties about the day to day experience of living with the disorder. By using the company’s proprietary platform, trainees take on the role of Beatriz and follow her as she moves through days at different life stages to better understand how complications of Alzheimers can impact previously straightforward tasks. This immersive training can help foster a better understanding of patients’ lives before their diagnoses.

Assignment Idea: Leveraging the “Empathy Machine”

Description

Immersive technology broadly – and virtual reality specifically – has often been called “the empathy machine” due to its outsize ability to put viewers in the shoes of those from other walks of life. In the realm of healthcare, this allows differently abled people to inhabit life with a disability, neuroatypicality, degenerative disorder and the like, offering up a path to understanding those in-care with greater clarity.

Outside of health, what other areas of human-to-human understanding might VR help to unlock? As an example, one could imagine immigration officers being deeply affected by an immersive experience of those attempting to flee across another country’s border. In your imagined scenario, who stands to gain from greater insight into the life of another? What interpersonal or social issues might this insight avoid or even improve?

Subject Areas

Communications, Human Development & Family Studies, Psychology

Deliverables

  • explore a similar experience to the training in the example (1, 2)
  • establish a community of focus and those who will use VR to understand
  • if you are not part of this community, research at least two common points of controversy, contention or challenge faced by the community
  • imagine scenarios that will portray the issue in day-to-day human terms
  • create a storyboard for one of these scenarios, including correct/incorrect options for the VR user to try
  • shoot a video demonstration of this scenario, acting out the various options (optional)