Flashback to VRLA 2018 with Carrie Shaw talking about the founding story of Embodied Labs, which provides VR training to care givers. Shaw is featured in the 5th chapter of Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri’s In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles field study conducted in 2018.
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[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast about the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this is episode two of five of a series of leading up to the book of The Land of the Unreal, Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles by Yale anthropologist Lisa Masseri. Today's episode is going to be diving into the story of Carrie Shaw, who is the co-founder and CEO of Embodied Labs. I actually had a chance to talk to her on Saturday, May 5th, 2018 at VRLA, where we're talking about her journey into creating this really amazing company that was using virtual reality to help train care workers who were working with people with different neurodegenerative diseases. So Carrie, when she was 18, her mother had early onset Alzheimer's. And so she had to become one of her mother's primary caregivers. And it's from that experience that she wanted to use these immersive technologies to help train other people who are becoming caregivers or people who are working in these nursing homes to better understand the type of phenomenological experiences that the people that they're caring for might be going through. And so It was a super inspiring story. And one of my great regrets is that I haven't published this yet. And I was just looking back to see like what was happening with me in 2018. And I think I did like 25 trips, some of them VR, some of them not in the course of 2018. And then I did 18 trips within 2019. and then the pandemic happened. And so as I was reading through Lisa Masseri's book, there's a lot of these people that she's featuring that I have these unpublished interviews. So I wanted to go back through my archive and start to publish some of these to prepare folks for Lisa Masseri's really landmark anthropological study into the VR community. So really happy to have had this conversation with Carrie and Carrie apologies that I haven't been able to have a chance to publish this sooner, but I think what Shaw and the rest of embodied labs is doing is really quite amazing. They were able to secure some funding back in 2020. And so, yeah, they've continued to do a lot of really amazing work with using virtual reality in the context of training care workers. So. That's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Keri happened on Saturday, May 5, 2018, at VRLA in Los Angeles, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:20.896] Carrie Shaw: KERI SHAW, EMBODYED LABS CEO AND FOUNDER, EMBODYED LABS My name is Keri Shaw, and I'm the CEO and founder of EMBODYED LABS. And we create experiences in the aging space for caregivers, both professional and family, to better understand the journey of our elders.
[00:02:35.888] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could tell me a bit about how this company came about.
[00:02:39.318] Carrie Shaw: This company for me was inspired by my journey as a caregiver for my mom who had early onset Alzheimer's disease. She got diagnosed when I was in my teens and then I went on and I studied public health and then eventually medical illustration and saw how powerful visual communication was and that we could cut through language and cultural and education barriers by having really strong visuals and when I discovered VR I thought What if I could now answer this question I always had about my mom's journey of building a world that would help me see what she was seeing and live her experience and then try and connect that back to being a better caregiver for her.
[00:03:19.878] Kent Bye: Right. So it sounds like that, you know, I just went through the experience here. So I saw the visualizations as well as a little narrative experience that tells a story of different experiences. Maybe you could take a step back and say, who is this content being created for? And then maybe talk about the deeper intention of why it's being created. And then where you're going from there.
[00:03:41.047] Carrie Shaw: Yeah, so today we have customers that are long-term care facilities, senior care living spaces, and home health care and home health agencies for nurses and so they use our experiences for staff training. We have a whole bunch of content in our library and we release a new experience roughly every quarter and they're all around key issues in senior care. So we have series of five-minute modules that all link back into themes around vision and hearing impairment, Alzheimer's disease, like you tried. We have one that we're releasing in a few weeks about end-of-life care. And all of these things are used as a core curriculum in a bigger training where we tie it back into staff meetings or dementia in-service trainings. Or even now, we've created a family caregiver program where if a long-term care facility, for example, is offering a support group, then they can use our encompassing curriculum to help family members go through these VR experiences and then debrief to really understand what their loved ones are going through.
[00:04:44.942] Kent Bye: Yeah, and part of the actual direct experience of going through this video, there was moments when you were asked to read a prompt. And then as that audio was coming back to you, it was sort of all jumbled up. And it took me a couple of times to actually figure out that, oh, that's what was happening. I thought it was like maybe an error of the technology or something like maybe the recording got bad but it was sort of like this realizes the deliberate construction of like trying to give this sense of confusion of what might be happening in the mind and maybe you could talk a bit about if people have been able to research and discover that there's this kind of jumbling or if that was just sort of an artistic decision you went towards just to give this sense of having the jumbling effect.
[00:05:25.857] Carrie Shaw: That was entirely intentional and I'm so excited that you noticed that. One of the biggest things, so when we build these, we'd spend time immersed with people that are living with these conditions. So Alzheimer's disease, we spent time shadowing lots of different people living with this and talking with them. And then we also talk with experts that are either medical professionals or researchers. So my background in medical illustration is that I want to use the same process for what we create in Embodied Labs as you would for a medical animation where you're trying to visualize how proteins fold, something we just discovered. And so I collect all this information that I can from patients, from professionals, from the literature, and then recreate these journeys to the most highest level of accuracy as possible. And for that particular piece, One of the things that our content experts said was, Carrie, the biggest misconception of Alzheimer's disease is that it's a disease of memory loss. And really, it's a disease of the whole brain. So as you saw, you got introduced to the brain. And in other pieces of this journey, you learn about the different areas, like how vision is processed and speech and hearing. And so from these journeys, you start to notice, oh, wait, when I speak, I think I'm saying something I mean to say, but it's coming back jumbled up. And that becomes a discussion point with our family caregivers to say, you know, when your loved one is talking to you and you're not sure what they're saying, you know, they're actually meaning something, they're communicating with you. So how do you help people embody that experience and then think about strategies to communicate? And same with the auditory processing, we research what we think to our best knowledge. It sounds like when someone has auditory processing problems. And so we had the actors speak kind of jumbled up in a similar way.
[00:07:11.607] Kent Bye: Yeah, and there was also kind of a modulation of the sort of frequencies that are going high or low, but you kind of have this almost interference that's coming in. And is this also informed by your own experience with your mother of, like, you know, having these experiences? And maybe you could talk about, like, what that was like and then how this kind of sent you on this journey of your career.
[00:07:32.099] Carrie Shaw: This particular experience is kind of my baby of all the content that we've created. So I co-wrote this with Ryan Labar as he co-directed the whole production. So part of our journey was to take what I knew from personal experience and then build a really strong narrative arc and kind of scientifically accurate experience. It was for me actually very therapeutic to build in a lot of my knowledge from my decade caring for my mom. to play out into a training experience that I felt was the one I would have wanted to see. And it's been really fun to have caregivers say, you know, I wish I had this when I went through my journey with my mom or now that I'm in it, now I know what to experience next. And being able to use the power of VR to move us really quickly through time is so perfect because Alzheimer's is a really long disease and caregivers are going through really high-stress scenarios where they don't know what to expect next. But through this three-part, 15-minute journey, you can create a visual vocabulary for caregivers to at least start asking questions to figure out more about what they can do.
[00:08:41.965] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's funny, as you were saying caregiver, I just sort of assume that these are like nurses that are being trained, but you're really kind of talking about the sons and daughters of these parents who are going through this and that this is in some ways to prepare for this journey that they're about to go on.
[00:08:55.692] Carrie Shaw: Yeah, it's been neat because in building our business, well, first of all, I didn't know if we had a business around this concept. And so our first year was spent doing a lot of just work of getting experiences out there and figuring out how to even share them with people. And we found resonance in being able to sell our subscriptions to our library to aging services organizations. So now that we have about 20 different aging services groups using this, I've seen a natural affinity where they want to train their professional caregivers, like it's a CNA. a nurse. It's a director of nursing and it might even be like the CFO of the organization. So they use this to train the whole company and have almost like a company culture shift using this as a tool. But then we're getting more and more groups that offer it as a workshop to their community as outreach and education for the people that they serve, which are the residents in their facilities and also the family members. So that's been a recent thing that I've loved seeing happen more and more is that professional caregivers and family caregivers are educated in the same way and this builds a bridge and a common experience between them. And then that gives them this opportunity to talk with each other about maybe what's different than the experience they went on or what they shared in common with it. And yeah, it's just been so powerful to see that working well in the real world.
[00:10:19.897] Kent Bye: Yeah, and maybe you could step through what you see as the typical workflow for someone who may be just getting a diagnosis or maybe have lived with this for a few years and then how they go from dealing with this to then finding these different organizations and then maybe, you know, sitting and watch one of these experiences.
[00:10:37.150] Carrie Shaw: Yeah, so about two weeks ago I was at the LA Convention Center and I was on a panel with five people living with dementia and the panel was four neurologists that were all here for their annual meeting and the purpose of it was to help communicate to neurologists from the patient side how they wanted to receive their diagnoses and be educated on what to do next. So there was a lot of sharing of what didn't work for these people that had been diagnosed with dementia and then what did work. And I actually was kind of terrified because I shared my experience. I did a live demo for the neurologist during this panel and then for the people living with dementia. And it was just this vulnerable moment of saying, like, here's how I've interpreted a journey that these people are on. And so then we had lunch together and we're talking about how do you create a common journey that represent so many unique voices. But I just circumvented your question a little bit.
[00:11:39.512] Kent Bye: Do you want me to go back? No, so I guess where you went with it was talking about the narrative interpretation of it and I guess part of the question is trying to get in my mind of like just imagining one of my parents getting a diagnosis and then what is the process by which then they come aware of this and then they start to watch it. So like what those steps are, like for example, is it they just get a diagnosis and then they immediately within a week are seeing this, or if they've lived with it for a few, I'm just trying to get a sense of how people are getting funneled into this.
[00:12:09.615] Carrie Shaw: Really people with the diagnosis aren't the ones that are seeing this as much as the family members of people who are living with it. So one of the things we've talked about is what if this could be part of a care plan for caregivers. So if anyone gets diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer's disease it would be required that they have to go through something like embodied labs so that they can then understand how the disease physiology works and learn about the brain and then understand what's going to happen and be able to be directed towards the resources depending on the stage of the disease where someone's been diagnosed. So right now we're not as much doing that. We're not in hospitals. We're not part of a flow with physicians that are diagnosing this in their clinics, but that's where I hope it'll go and where our scientific advisors hope it will go to that are practicing physicians.
[00:13:03.513] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it was interesting to start with the visualization because it was nice to be able to just get a story of what this disease and what's actually happening at that level of the neurons and just to watch that. Why is that part important? Why has that been a part of your journey to learn about these medical visualizations and maybe how it's helped you understand this process?
[00:13:26.086] Carrie Shaw: When my mom was sick, I knew she had the diagnosis. Well, for a while we didn't know, but once she got it, I was like, okay, she has Alzheimer's, early-onset Alzheimer's disease. And especially in her early stages, little things would go wrong. She'd be forgetting things and asking me questions over and over. And even though I knew she had this disease, I would still get so mad and so impatient with her. I think the purpose of showing the brain and really trying to help people get inside the brain and then link that back out to the big picture in the story, you can shift from thinking that there's something that that person is doing intentionally because you know, their meaning to be frustrating or trying to forget. And then you realize you have embodied this experience with the brain that helps you intuitively remember and connect, no, this isn't the person. This is their brain. This is something that's happening because of an illness that they have. And that's actually one of the questions we do a lot with assessment and trying to quantify and measure what some outcomes are of these trainings. back to care practice or something you've learned. And we ask people to rank before and after, you know, my residents do X because they mean to or because they're disruptive versus them then coming out and saying, my residents do this because of it being their brain, not because they intend to have poorer behavior. Yeah.
[00:14:53.349] Kent Bye: And maybe you can talk a bit about some of the other neurodegenerative diseases that you're covering here with Embodied Labs.
[00:14:59.084] Carrie Shaw: So we started out with a journey about macular degeneration and hearing loss, which are the two most common audiovisual impairments in older adults. So in that one, you embody a journey. It's called Alfred's Experience. And so you go through what it's like to be at home. It's your birthday. You have this central vision loss, which is macular degeneration. And then you go to the doctor and you're actually getting a cognitive assessment. And then one of the big things that people realize going through it is that hearing and vision and cognition have an interesting link together. And if somebody is struggling to hear and see, it might appear that there's a problem with something that's entirely unrelated. Another one that we're about to release isn't about a disease necessarily. It's about end-of-life. The way we build our content pipeline is we have these being used by all these groups in care, care facilities, and they say, you know, here's what we wish we could see next given what's going on. And so end-of-life came up for them as being really important because there's so much especially I think in our country that we fear about the end of life that we don't talk about and then when it comes down to actually being in your end of life there's all these decisions you have to make that are hard to make when you haven't had time to prepare for them. And then the ones that we're creating next are going to continue to dive into dementia but not just Alzheimer's disease We're going to dive deeper into vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and Lewy body dementia, which are the top ones other than Alzheimer's that people have. One of the big misconceptions is that dementia and Alzheimer's are kind of the same thing, and there's actually 26 kinds of dementia, and they're all very different from each other. And then Parkinson's disease has been another big one that we've heard would be valuable for us to create. And then from there, I mean, we kind of dreamed up and have all these feedback from care professionals of what to make next. And it's kind of a matter of scaling the company up. getting revenue and funding to put back into content creation and then we hope to dive into things like learning disabilities and perspectives of children or diversity training. Another big one that might come around the same time as our senior care ones I just mentioned is something on cardiovascular health and heart disease. So I could talk for days about the content I want to create but the truth is it's a harder place to get to.
[00:17:27.905] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you could talk a bit about how you went from your career path, like how VR entered in the picture. Like, what was the catalyst for you to start to then see this as a potential tool to be used in this context?
[00:17:40.114] Carrie Shaw: I always had the question in my mind of, like, why can't we step into other people's worlds? That was kind of the first spark that happened as soon as my mom got sick when I was a teenager. I went into global health. I was in the Peace Corps for a while, and I was teaching reproductive health. and I couldn't speak the language or really knew the culture of the country where I was doing this work, but I figured out I could draw. I didn't really know I could draw, but that was the one way I could visualize health for people and cross all these barriers. So then when I went back to grad school, I went into a medical illustration program where you're taking science and you're taking art and you're trying to further how we understand human health. And this question, my mom was now like eight years into her disease and it was still on my mind and it was driving me crazy. And I was like, maybe I'll tackle this for my research project that I get to choose. And so it became my senior or my master's thesis project. And then I met who's now my co-founder, a developer that was prototyping this with me. We got really into like Jeremy Bailenson's work on embodied cognition, embodied learning. Actually, I was so into the theory of everything that I had accepted a Ph.D. program with one of Jeremy Bailenson's former students in Urbana-Champaign and was just going to go study this concept and how it might transfer back into workforce training. But I met another person that joined the team, Ryan Labar, who I mentioned, and he's a virtual reality filmmaker that worked closely with Tom and I to create a workflow to blend 360. And this is all right at the time the first commercial Rift was coming out, so we were operating with some of the development kits and putting together workflows that just weren't very common at the time, still using Leap Motion and all of that, because of the theory around embodiment and what you need in terms of presence and immersion to create an experience that will work. And so... We fell in love with the prototyping process. We had made this one experience, the Alfred Lab, about hearing and vision impairment, and somehow we thought that it was smart to incorporate as a business entity with like an 80 gigabyte executable file and no plan to deliver it to anybody. But now, almost two years later, we've got a platform, a framework for delivering curriculum, and then also a way to track analytics and outcomes, and we have about 20 customers in our target markets and enough revenue to call it a business and keep growing.
[00:20:15.353] Kent Bye: How do you measure success here?
[00:20:17.795] Carrie Shaw: I'm really shocked that I can say we're almost two years old. So success is just the longest amount of time I get to spend trying to build this idea into value that can not only bring meaning to caregivers, but also sustain itself as something that has created a monetary value that people pay for, because that's how we're going to actually make VR an industry and not just a fad.
[00:20:45.494] Kent Bye: Great. So what's next for Embodied Labs?
[00:20:48.776] Carrie Shaw: We are really focused right now on getting our programs into as many long-term care and home health care organizations as possible, and at the same time, building content in senior care space. So we're showing that this is a great way. We're creating a model, and we're really focused on the customer, our target customer, and building a product that meets their needs and the content that meets their needs. And so we want to grow our subscription base of our market and then I want to start expanding out into other verticals of health care and then from there moving into things like teacher training with the same kind of framework. So just honing in on a model that works, that can be expanded and replicated. And even, so I see this having really great global applications. And we're just starting to have some of those early conversations, too, of how this really is a need, not just in the US, but could be taken around the world.
[00:21:47.922] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and what it might be able to enable?
[00:21:56.642] Carrie Shaw: Ooh, this is a question I've heard a lot of people answer. The ultimate potential of virtual reality is to cross all of the borders that we create in the physical world and unite people around shared experiences.
[00:22:14.716] Kent Bye: Awesome. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:22:20.800] Carrie Shaw: I don't think so. I feel great about that. You asked me great questions.
[00:22:25.707] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:22:27.749] Carrie Shaw: Yeah, thanks. It was exciting to run into you. I'm glad I said hi. Awesome.
[00:22:33.733] Kent Bye: Thanks. So that was Carrie Shaw. She's the co-founder and CEO of Embodied Labs. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, well, this is a story that I've thought a lot about over the years. In fact, I included a little excerpt of this interview with Carrie in my episode 1000 because I feel like a lot of what she's doing is living into the potential of what VR could actually become. So Carrie actually invited in Lisa Masseri, this anthropologist from Yale, into her business and really opened up all these dimensions of her business. And so she's really prominently featured in Chapter 5 called Special Affect, that's A-F-F-E-C-T, in Empathy Machine Otherwise. And so in the previous chapter, Chapter 4, Lisa Masseri is deconstructing the Empathy Machine you know, all the different problematic aspects with this idea. And then goes into chapter five, how VR is used in the possibility of creating a relational economy of care that Lisa Masseri is theorizing as a key difference, that it's augmenting these caregivers' ability to better care people that they're already in relationship with. And so this reframing of the empathy machine into how would it be used in the context where there's already a relationship that's established. Also, lots of interesting unpacking and deconstructing of empathy as a way of framing and advertising what Embody Labs is doing. And the way that Carrie's pitching Embody Labs has gone through a number of different iterations, even after this interview as Lisa Masseri documents within the context of her book. But there was something around empathy not being a value proposition that was actually driving people to use the technology. It was more of what are the existing business needs or other needs that are going to have more of a financial bottom line. And so there's an interesting way in that in order to kind of manifest into this empathy machine, there's a way that empathy had to be erased from the equation of a value proposition that was used in the context of the business. And so lots of really fascinating unpacking of the journey of Keri Shaw in the context of the book Lane of the Unreal by Lisa Masseri. Again, highly, highly recommend checking out that book that comes out this Friday, March 8, 2024. And like I said, I've been deeply inspired by what Carrie has been able to do with Embodied Labs, and hope to catch up with her again at some point just to kind of check in and see how the stories continue to unfold for her since we had this brief interaction in VRLA back in 2018. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. so you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
