Virtual reality may help relieve pain during childbirth

A woman testing a virtual reality headset developed by a German manufacturer Zeiss at the Gamescom fair in Cologne, Germany in 2015. — Reuters

Immersion in virtual reality may relieve some of the pain of contractions before childbirth, a small study suggests.

In a half-hour test among 40 hospitalised women in labour, those who used VR headsets that provided relaxing scenes and messages reported pain reductions compared with those who didn't get headsets, researchers said in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in Grapevine, Texas, United States.