About 10 years ago, when Jason Kutch first began surfing, he paddled out to ride the waves in considerable pain. Then a postdoctoral researcher at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Kutch had suffered for years with several chronic pain conditions, including migraines, low back pain and pelvic pain.
But after each novice surf session, he experienced an extraordinary shift.
“I got out of the water and I was like, ‘Where did the pain go?’” says Kutch, now a professor in the USC Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy at the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry of USC.
Each time, the pain didn’t return for several days. “Once I recognized how stable and reliable that pattern of pain relief was, it took all of the anxiety out of chronic pain,” Kutch says. “Finally, there was something that I could do to control it.”
That revelation touched off a decade of research into the neurobiology of pain and the promise of surfing as a therapy. Early on, Kutch gathered data at the shoreline, tracking chronic pain sufferers’ self-reported pain before and after surf sessions.
Today, his research participants don’t zip into wetsuits or paddle into the Pacific Ocean. They don VR headsets and catch digital waves at the USC Health Sciences Campus, thanks to an immersive surfing simulator Kutch and his collaborators designed and built in Kutch’s basement lab with support from the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Users sit, kneel or stand on a surfboard mounted atop a motion platform that responds to movements they make in the virtual seascape.
“It simulates the momentary feeling of weightlessness you get when you’re caught by the wave, and then you can slide down the wave and carve back and forth,” Kutch says. “But unlike waves in the real world, in VR we can keep them perfect and going on forever.”
The project is one of several endeavors led by USC researchers that leverage realistic wave simulations to advance scientific discovery about ocean-related phenomena, from surfing to tsunamis. These technologies include both human-made waves in wave pools and interactive digital wave experiences, offering unprecedented opportunities for scholars to study — and users to immerse in — waves without the potential dangers, accessibility barriers and unpredictability of the ocean itself…
Continue reading the full article in USC Trojan Family Magazine