Most people don’t look forward to doctor visits, especially when it can involve being poked with needles or having to stay still in a giant metal tube for an MRI. As a pediatrician, Evelyn Chan saw children struggle with fear and anxiety during routine procedures, so she used virtual reality (VR) to solve the problem. Enter: Smileyscope.
The Smileyscope device, which looks like a View-Master (’90s kids will know), is strapped onto a patient’s head and leads them through various VR simulations—such as an underwater adventure introduced by a penguin—during common procedures like shots, infusions, and MRIs. The headset, meant for patients ages four and up, uses neuromodulation, helps control the way pain signals reach the brain and therefore reduces discomfort during the procedure. During the clinical-trial process, the Smileyscope team found the device reduced patient pain up to 40% and anxiety up to 60%.
Smileyscope has sold about 400 devices since launching in Australia in January 2021 and started selling in the US later that year, with hospitals paying a $3,000 annual software license fee in exchange for the device. Several American hospitals have bought the device, including Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. The hospital’s child life team, which plays with sick kids while they’re hospitalized to take their minds off treatment, has two Smileyscope devices they use a handful of times each week, said team manager Shira Miller.
They’ve seen some “very dramatically positive results” in terms of patient responses, as well as a reduction in time that staff has to spend with each patient—which saves money, she said.
Chan, the CEO of Smileyscope, sat down for an interview with Healthcare Brew.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What feedback have you heard from hospitals or other providers that bought the device on how it’s affected their business?
What we find is that clinicians say that their workflow is improved. In this time, when there’s sort of a lot of staffing issues, they’re not having to pull in additional staff to help calm down a patient or hold them down if we need to or stabilize them. We found that…they’ve been able to free up staff.
We have an MRI simulation program so that patients can feel and see and understand what it would be like to be in an MRI scan before they actually go through it. Our technology can track head movement, so we can actually have a bit of an indication of whether the patient can stay still during that scan. At the moment, most patients, if they’re under the age of eight or 10 years old, get put to sleep for an MRI automatically. That takes a long time and additional resources. What we find with Smileyscope is that we save about $500,000 per MRI tube every year by being able to help support patients and prepare them for their MRI procedure. When you multiply, there’s usually three or four MRI scanners in a pediatric hospital, maybe more in an adult hospital as well. That has huge savings just for one department alone.
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So the cost savings comes from things like not having to pay for extra resources like anesthesia?
If you can more efficiently use the MRI scanner, you can fit in an additional patient, for example. And also bedtime, because usually if you need an anesthetic, then the patient needs to be admitted for, let’s say, four to six hours. If you’re [conducting] an awake scan, they need a patient bed for probably about half that time.
Has the device proven to be helpful for children with a developmental disability, where taking them to a doctor might require more soothing than it would for a neurotypical child?
We’ve done a couple of clinical studies where we’ve found that children with autism actually have really good response rates to Smileyscope. For example, recently with an MRI study, we found that looking at children with autism preparing for MRI, we’ve been able to prepare them adequately so that they don’t need to be sedated and can successfully go through an awake MRI, which you can imagine for a child with autism is quite scary. There’s a lot of sensory overload.
Do you see Smileyscope eventually being acquired by a bigger digital health player, or do you think you’ll be the one doing the acquiring?
Being an early pioneer in the VR healthcare space, it gives us huge advantages. It means that we have that flexibility of seeing where this will pan out. For Smileyscope, we want to be the biggest and best company that we can be and deliver the most impact for our patients. So, I think that would be the latter, becoming a large player and acquiring and expanding. But time will tell.