VR headsets lower blood pressure in the ER, doctors find
A small Ankara study found that a calm virtual forest and classical music helped patients with very high blood pressure settle faster.
Emergency medicine specialists in Ankara ran a small study to test whether gaming VR headsets could calm patients arriving with dangerously high blood pressure. Sixty-five people treated for hypertensive urgency were randomly assigned a headset showing a quiet nature scene alongside classical music, with a further 65 as a control group. All of them still received the standard medication.
The VR group's blood pressure and anxiety fell faster than the control group's, results presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress indicate. The doctors behind the work note that the noise, bright lights and uncertainty of an emergency department can push readings higher, and suggest a few minutes of virtual calm may help them come down sooner. They treat the finding as an early signal rather than proof.
Tags
- vr
- hardware
Sources
Where this story ran: one outlet on 28 September 2026. The summary above is written by GamersGuild; the links go to the original reports.