Deepak Chopra Gets Into Virtual Reality

Indian American author, public speaker and alternative medicine advocate and ever a believer in technology, Deepak Chopra has founded Jiyo with Poonacha Machaiah serial social entrepreneur. Their project aims to create a technology platform to deliver a comprehensive set of services for the promotion of health and prevention of disease.

What exactly will the Jiyo app do?
First of all, we're not calling it an app. We're a service provider for well-being. That includes all areas of well-being -- physical, emotional, spiritual, career, financial, community, social and corporate well-being. All these 'buckets' will have their separate experts. There will be content and metrics and products and social engagement with participants. Our mantra is personalised, preventable, process-oriented, predictable, and participatory. These are the five pillars on which we will rely to take our services to the world. Ninety percent of the services are free.

Will it compete with what healthcare startups are doing?
There is no such product right now. We are working with Apollo Hospital and Apollo pharmacies and companies that are clients for Apollo. We are also collaborating with Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi and many other organisations including something called Mind Body Online which is the largest directory of mind body services in the world, so wherever you are, you can get services. I was last week in Bazo and I was able to discover within 200 yards of me a place where I could go for meditation, take a yoga lesson, go buy healthy food or go to a good restaurant. All these meet the criteria of well-being.

Other than recommendations such as these, how are you planning to use technology?
We are going to use virtual reality to give people immersive experiences augmented with real life experiences wherever they happen to be. We are coming out with a product called Finding Your True Self on August 15th, This will be a full immersive meditation experience with me under Buddha's Tree of Enlightenment and what you see is the entire universe as an activity in consciousness fading in and out and ultimately it will give you an experience of total silence and of the observer. This is very unique and we've done this with a production company and content provider in Hollywood. We're going to offer it to big companies from Google to Facebook. We are also looking at holographic technology so that we can give seminars everywhere, even at multiple locations at the same time.

Do you see VR playing a big part in healing?
In the future, I see virtual reality being involved in the treatment of phobias, weight loss, diabetes, hypertension, neurological disorders. Nobody's tapping into this right now. But even for when a person has a paralysed arm, seeing the other arm move through virtual reality, the experience signals the brain to move the paralysed arm. These are early stages and we are still doing research and assessing the results. Five years from now, when you go to a doctor, instead of medicine -- which may still be necessary -- you will also get a VR experience for things like high blood pressure or anxiety. This is ongoing at the Chopra Center which is affiliated with the University of California. We look at everything from inflammatory markers to gene expression and bioinformatics as a result of a shift in experience.

What about the motion sickness that users still feel with VR?
We feel motion sickness even in a car. Motion sickness is very easily adapted to in a few sessions. With Jiyo we hope to reach a billion people -- there are so many areas, from exercise to pranayama to meditation with experts whom we are curating for all these fields.