Apple considers using its upcoming $3,500 mixed-reality headset “Vision Pro” for treating mental health of users, according to reports.
Apple Vision Pro, unveiled in the mid of 2023, is one of the long-awaited apple products that’s planned to launch next year. Packed with a dozen cameras, and several sensors, the mixed-reality headset can sense your eye movements, facial expressions and your hand movements. Besides these, a new report by The Information says that it might also diagnose and treat mental illness.
Mental Illness among adults is a serious concern in U.S. One in five of U.S. adults and teenagers aged 13 to 18 struggle with mental illness. Indeed, one in 20 U.S. adults suffer from severe mental illness such as depression, schizophrenia, according to Mental Health America’s report. Apple aims to address these mental health problems with Vision Pro.
How Vision Pro will treat Mental Health?
The mixed reality headset equips 12 cameras and 23 sensors as in whole, which could be used to sense users’ facial expressions, feelings and emotions. The headset’s technology will then analyze these inputs and detect levels of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of stress, sources familiar with the matter told The Information.
As the headset can also track the eye movements, it can measure pupil dilation and evaluate users’ motion, in order to detect signs of Parkinson’s disease. The headset would then display images and sounds on its internal screen that might improve users’ emotions and moods.
Apple has already introduced mental health features on its Health app in June, where iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch users can track their moods and monitor their mental health, apart from their physical activity. Adding on to it, Vision Pro’s data of your facial expressions and more, would supplement these features in the app. Apple’s next year iPhone model will have an inbuilt Vision Pro pairing feature, which might be helpful in this aspect.
More on Vision Pro
Vision Pro headset has two 23-million-pixel internal displays, one for each eye, for catering a 4K experience. The headset uses spatial computing technology, where computers or devices blend the physical world around it, and measures the movements as inputs. For example, you can play with your hand in air (like swipe left or right), for maneuvering the headsets’ features, and the headset will understand and reflect what you’re trying to do.
Read more about Apple Vision Pro headset.
Though Apple previously estimated to sell 1 million Vision Pro headsets in its first year of launch, the production of headset faces severe difficulties, due to which it reduced its estimates to under 400,000 in its first year, Financial Times reported.
Apple is also working on a cheaper version of Vision Pro, costing somewhere between $1,500 to $2,500, to apparently make its headset more accessible.
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