Some Assembly Required Autonomous Plant Nursery Capstone Design; Virtual Reality in the Health Care Industry and the Publics Perception

The research that has been proposed and conducted was created to explore different perspectives pertaining to the increase in virtual reality training in the healthcare system and address why these differences exist and how to maybe overcome them. The analysis I used to address this issue was to discuss this change with individuals from different demographics and discover if there are any valid concerns and see how these will be addressed in the future. Because of the tension between the public and the health care industry reaching an all time high after the Corona Virus ravaging the entire world and causing extra stress on the health care industry and somehow becoming political, causing the public to become skeptic and untrusting, it is important that as these new systems progress, they do so in a way that help take off some of the stress of the industry while improving the relationship with the public. Health care is an important and vital part of life today and finding a way to fix this relationship and increase people’s perception will create a more trusting environment, which could save lives. To gather information and complete this analysis, I plan to use the Social Construction of Technology or SCOT framework that draws from ethics of care to create an analysis through interviews and surveys with both case studies and interviews with patients and healthcare professionals. The use of SCOT will help to determine how virtual reality is embedded in its social context and by bringing different perspectives together to see different shared or diverging interpretations of both the technology and how it can be better used. From this research I expect to find not only different perspectives from different representations, but also some reasoning as to why these different perspectives exist, what their correlation is, and a way to cross this divide. Hopefully if there are some valid reasons that people have for not trusting or wanting virtual reality in health care that is not already understood this research will help to uncover it.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
Technical Advisor: Harry Powell
STS Advisor: Pedro Francisco
Technical Team Members: Ryland Buck, Boluwatife Raufu, Joseph Sam, McKayla Thomas