Good morning, and welcome to the second edition of Go West. I’m Rebecca Robbins, and I’ll be your guide today and every Wednesday to the most interesting stories in life sciences happening up and down the West Coast.
I want to start today’s newsletter by telling you about a new clinical trial at Stanford testing virtual reality in an underserved population: Spanish speakers with limited proficiency in English. The study caught my eye because virtual reality is so often confined to the usual Silicon Valley crowd, which is to say mostly white and mostly wealthy.
Another thing that made this study stand out to me: The idea for the trial was dreamed up by a 24-year-old researcher who noticed a problem.
Ahtziri Fonseca is a clinical research coordinator who works on virtual reality studies at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. She often works closely with the families of pediatric patients undergoing surgery and other medical procedures. Fonseca, who is Latina, observed that Spanish-speaking parents often “had more anxiety about certain procedures, just because of the language and cultural barriers.” That parental anxiety could sometimes trickle down to their kids, making them more anxious about their own procedure.
Then Fonseca thought of something that might help. Her team already had software meant to guide users through breathing exercises in virtual reality — with voiceovers in English. What if Fonseca, a native Spanish speaker, could help translate those voiceovers into Spanish so that Spanish speakers could try the technology, too?
Fonseca’s idea led to the new clinical trial — in which Spanish-speaking parents are transported via virtual reality into a calming natural world where a waterfall flows and an aurora of colorful lights fills the night sky.
Read more about the study.
HERE'S A VISUAL FROM THE VIRTUAL REALITY EXPERIENCE BEING TESTED. (MIGHTY IMMERSION)
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