With roughly 1 in 5 affected individuals, chronic pain is incredibly widespread on a global scale. Virtual reality offers unique abilities to shift patients’ attention away from pain; however, distraction often provides only transient relief from pain and therefore does not necessarily offer long-term analgesic remediation.
At Soma Rem, we have developed a novel and innovative approach to pain management that utilizes virtual avatars as active sensory feedback training modalities through the dynamic modification of virtual limbs and bodies that are perceived as one's own. Our multimodal stimulus control enables physical-to-virtual body transfer illusions to reshape the interactive processing between central and peripheral mechanisms, and alleviate pain through the targeted and individualized improvement of body perception disturbances.
OUR MISSION
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
Jasmine Ho, PhD
Neuroscientist
​I developed Soma Rem as a low risk and non-invasive management tool for chronic pain. Our innovative embodied virtual reality application uses a simple graphic user interface to renormalize aberrant body perceptions and alter the perceived properties of chronic pain through multimodal modifications of embodied virtual avatars.
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My scientific career has focused on better understanding disorders of bodily self-consciousness, and employing, as well as promoting, altered states of embodiment using virtual, augmented, and mixed reality as potential therapeutic applications for clinical disorders of bodily perception.
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Our Journey So Far
