BehaVR: Virtual Mindfulness

(Royalty-free image courtesy of Pixabay.)

This post is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as medical advice. Please contact your doctor or other healthcare professional with any medical questions or concerns.

BehaVR takes a new approach to mindfulness--with virtual reality at its core.

And the idea behind its virtual-reality experiences: how to put mind-body medicine into effect.

With BehaVR, patients strap on a headset, and go through an experience that illustrates the ways they can choose their thoughts. Those thoughts, in turn, help them to choose healthier responses to events in their lives.

Dr. Peter Buecker is the Chief Medical Officer of BehaVR, in Louisville, Kentucky. "Dr. Pete", as his patients call him, is an orthopedic surgeon with a passion for mind-body medicine. In addition to his work with BehaVR, he is the founder and CEO of Metamynd, a personal and organizational training organization. He is also the owner of Mindpointe, LLC, which offers "health solutions for mind, body and life".

Dr. Pete talked about his introduction to VR, how he came on board with BehaVR and how their experiences work.

On this edition of Over Coffee®,, you will hear:

How Dr. Pete first experienced virtual reality;

How he came on board with BehaVR;

Some of the challenges of "gamifying" mindfulness through VR:

How BehaVR's first mindfulness platform works;

The ways their newest platform, "Firefly", works. to combat addiction;

How the platforms, customized to individual users, feed back information in real time;

A new development with the FDA in the area of digital medicine;

How BehaVR is currently being used across the country;

What the BehaVR staff is currently working on, for an individualized program.

Some of the lessons involved in learning to create VR (including a creative mistake that highlighted what needs to happen in production!).