Delaware’s Stephen Sye is working on this VR training platform for heart rhythm disorders

With all the noise surrounding virtual reality — the Meta layoffs, the power plays, the tech world’s general disdain for Mark Zuckerberg for perhaps misjudging the immediate consumer commercial value of extended reality — it can be easy to miss the things that are happening in corners where the technology is growing, like healthcare.

One of the four pillars of MXR, or medical extended reality, is education, specifically medical training modules and simulations.

On May 19, a new virtual reality training platform, Heart Rhythm VR, will launch at the Heart Rhythm Society’s annual meeting in New Orleans.

The project has a Delaware tie: Wilmington-based Stephen Sye serves as the senior director of digital products for the DC-based Heart Rhythm Society. You may recognize Sye’s name for his other role as CEO of Futures First Gaming.

“In my role at the Heart Rhythm Society, I’m responsible for leveraging technology to disseminate education and information about the field of electrophysiology,” aka EP, Sye told Technical.ly. “The Heart Rhythm Society is a nonprofit medical society for electrophysiologists and the EP community’s mission is to end death and suffering due to heart rhythm disorders.”

Heart Rhythm VR is the first use of VR by the Heart Rhythm Society. The platform was created through a partnership with MedVR Education, led by Professor Prashanthan Sanders of the University of Adelaide in Australia and Dr. Michael Lloyd of Emory University in Atlanta. The international team developed an immersive VR training platform for Meta Quest versions 1, 2 and Pro, as well as Android-based devices.

With it, medical students, health professionals and experienced surgeons learning new procedures can perform a virtual surgery from beginning to end, starting with inserting an S-ICD, an implantable defibrillator for patients with a high risk of sudden cardiac arrest. Other trainings to come include atrial fibrillation ablation for patients with irregular heartbeat and insertion of transcatheter pacemakers.

There are three modes, Sye said: “a single user learning mode, with guided instruction on each step of the procedure; a multiplayer mode, where physicians from around the world collaborate and learn the procedure together; and there is an assessment mode with an evaluation tool through which we hope to award medical education credits.”

The Heart Rhythm VR team also sees the launch of the platform as an opportunity to connect and collaborate with medical innovation centers, universities and hospital systems.

“The beauty of this is that it is extremely customizable and adaptable,” Sye said. “Once a procedure is identified and a design document has been completed to start the development of a new module, it really only takes about 45 business days to be developed to potentially launch.”

Heart Rhythm VR is part of a small-but-growing trend of Delaware-tied VR prowess. Technical.ly first noticed it when healthcare system ChristianaCare won the prestigious 2018 Magnet Prize from the American Nurses Credentialing Center for using virtual reality technology to improve patients’ experience during chemotherapy, a type of distraction therapy that is now also used in pediatrics at Nemours Hospital for Children. ChristianaCare also uses VR for training, including a module for non-healthcare workers teaching how to use Narcan for opioid overdoses. And in the so-called metaverse, Wilmington-based podiatrist Linda Ciavarelli founded the first healthcare hub in Horizon Worlds, HouseCall VR.

As for Heart RhythmVR, it will be available after its May 19 launch.