41: Using digital & VR content to reduce the impact of concussions with Piya from TeachAids

15 Minutes With The Doctor: Learn from Healthcare Entrepreneurs and Innovators

Dr Piya Sorcar is the founder of TeachAids. She leads a team of world experts developing public health education content used in 82 countries. In this episode, we discuss Crashcourse, an education tool that aims to reduce the effect of concussions through interactive and virtual reality digital content. Learn about her journey, funding, creating compelling digital content and how universities, athletes and more are engaged in the initiative. What you will learn from this episode: What made TeachAids focus on developing CrashCourse? After expanding HIV education, TeachAids looked to researchers to think about the problems of tomorrow. They studied history and learned that cybersecurity, sexual abuse and sexual assault, and concussions were three key areas. They focused on concussions, initially in athletes, because more than three million sports and recreation-related concussions occur annually. Unfortunately, most people don’t report them, and that leads to further injury. What are the products in the Crashcourse suite? The very first product is Crashcourse football. It has all the embedded messages about everything that you would need to know for concussions. It starts during an intense football game with a packed audience. The second product is the Brain Fly, which is in video as well as virtual reality. TeachAids partnered with Stanford University’s neurosurgical simulation and virtual reality centre to create an actual life through the human brain, showing the brain’s blood and nervous system. And the third product is the Concussion Story Wall Website, an interactive database with more than 4000 video narratives from those injured and impacted by concussions. How does TeachAids fund its projects? TeachAids is 100% a nonprofit. All of the products are made available for free, and most of the people they have are volunteers. All of the experts they had and all of the celebrities and athletes involved have all volunteered. What is the WHY of your volunteers? What almost everyone has pointed to is the quality of the products. People want to be engaged with something that feels like it’s going to have an impact. People get very excited to work on something that’s high quality, which then creates a broader reach. And also, motivation comes from within. Everyone who cares so much realises how much work the project is. So they only ask others that they know can truly invest in the work. “When it comes to giving, people can either give their money or give their time. - Vinay” What’s been one of the most influential and helpful resources for TeachAids? Human capital has been the most helpful. They give all of their products out for free, and they cost many millions of dollars to produce. And there’s no way that they could raise that many millions of dollars to make it. And so, it’s a lot of people donating different kinds of talent to make it happen. Links: Get to know more about TeachAids & CrashCourse by visiting their website at: https://teachaids.org/ Connect with Vinay Shankar on LinkedIn Once Daily: https://www.oncedaily.co/creating-engaging-digital-content-for-health-vr-in-healthcare/