Dr. Lora Appel is an assistant professor of health informatics in the Faculty of Health at York University, an adjunct researcher at Michael Garron Hospital, and a collaborative scientist at OpenLab, an innovation centre housed at University Health Network, where she leads “Prescribing Virtual Reality (VRx)” a collection of studies that introduce and evaluate AR/VR/MR interventions for patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers from acute-care settings like the ICU to patients’ homes. She received several grants from the Centre for Aging in Brain Health innovation to pursue this work in aging and dementia care.
She has collaborated with the Toronto Public Library on VRCHIVE, a workshop that used VR to capture experiences of intergenerational pairs during COVID, and she co-leads the design of the CVRriculum program, a new initiative empowering students and faculty to incorporate VR assignments in their coursework. At York she collaborates with professors in the Psychology Department to evaluate the potential of VR technologies to reduce anxiety in people with epilepsy and to reduce phantom limb pain in amputees. More recently she has collaborated with vision experts at Krembil Institute to explore the potential for VR to help with low-vision rehabilitation. Her expertise is in applying design thinking and science methodologies to healthcare innovation, and she is passionate about designing new technological interventions that provide care in the pursuit of a cure.
Research keywords:
User-centred care, applied research, digital interventions, virtual reality, rehabilitation
Themes | Global Health & Humanitarianism |
Status | Active |
Related Work |
N/A
|
Updates |
N/A
|
You may also be interested in...
Recap — Leveraging Systems Thinking for Effective Global Health Policies, with Tarra Penney
On October 30, Dahdaleh faculty fellow Dr. Tarra Penney presented on systems-based approach and how it can transform traditional methods of public health intervention. Her work seeks to address complex global health challenges by understanding ...Read more about this Post
Voices on the Move
Voices on the Move, launched in October 2024, is a podcast series exploring the complex relationship between climate change and mobility. It aims to amplify the voices and stories of researchers, climate migrants, and community ...Read more about this Project
Recap – Advancing Patient-Centered Tuberculosis Care in Resource-Limited Settings
On January 17, 2024, Dr. Charity Oga-Omenka, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, presented her research on global public health, healthcare access, and health services research, focusing on infectious diseases such as tuberculosis ...Read more about this Post