Design and Prototype of the AFIT Virtual Emergency Room: A Distributed Virtual Environment for Emergency Medical Simulation

Due to the increasing complexity of emergency medical care, medical staffs require increasingly sophisticated training systems. Virtual environments offer a low cost means to achieve a widely usable yet sophisticated training capability. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sponsored the Virtual Emergency Room (VER) project to develop a simulation system that enables emergency department personnel within level I and II emergency rooms to practice emergency medical procedures and protocols. The VER is a simulation facility that uses a distributed virtual environment architecture to enable real-time, multi-participant simulations. The potential advantages of this system include the ability to evaluate and refine treatment skills, and the ability to provide scenario-specific training for mobile military field hospital teams. These advantages will ultimately improve the readiness of emergency department staffs for a wide variety of trauma situations. This thesis represents the initial phase of a several-year research effort

Dent-ALS: Dentistry’s Virtual Reality Serious Gaming Solution For Advanced Life Support Training

THE GOAL: To develop a novel virtual reality (VR),interactive dental clinical environment wherein learners can engage with various clinical scenarios involving patient avatars, dental personnel and medical equipment consistent with a real-world dental office. THE PURPOSE: To utilize this VR environment for training dental learners to develop skills for recognizing a patient requiring urgent or emergent care and initiating evaluation and management in dental setting, a requisite skill for all dentists in clinical practice. THE POTENTIAL: A VR based learning environment allows learners to access these resources from remote locations, providing a cost effective and easily distributed simulation training solution. We intend to research this further and scientifically validate its effectivity

Design and evaluation of an augmented reality simulator using leap motion

Advances in virtual and augmented reality (AR) are having an impact on the medical field in areas such as surgical simulation. Improvements to surgical simulation will provide students and residents with additional training and evaluation methods. This is particularly important for procedures such as the endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV), which residents perform regularly. Simulators such as NeuroTouch, have been designed to aid in training associated with this procedure. The authors have designed an affordable and easily accessible ETV simulator, and compare it with the existing NeuroTouch for its usability and training effectiveness. This simulator was developed using Unity, Vuforia and the leap motion (LM) for an AR environment. The participants, 16 novices and two expert neurosurgeons, were asked to complete 40 targeting tasks. Participants used the NeuroTouch tool or a virtual hand controlled by the LM to select the position and orientation for these tasks. The length of time to complete each task was recorded and the trajectory log files were used to calculate performance. The resulting data from the novices\u27 and experts\u27 speed and accuracy are compared, and they discuss the objective performance of training in terms of the speed and accuracy of targeting accuracy for each system

Turning constraints into opportunities: Online delivery of communication skills simulation sessions to undergraduate medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted higher-learning institutions. Communication skills training in medical education needed innovative solutions to adjust to the situation. In times of change, evaluation channels should be developed, and any problems raised by learners and educators should be responded to rapidly. A remotely facilitated communication skills simulation-based training programme was piloted by the clinical skills laboratory tutors using Zoom as the online platform. The goal of the pilot session was to establish a communication skills training strategy remotely, to test an online session using the defined online platform and to assess its effectiveness. Though locally facilitated face-to-face simulationbased training as the conventional format is easier to use and experience, training on virtual simulation-based communication skills enabled through the online portal has been described by participants as both feasible and effective. The results show that an efficient educational environment can be provided by remote simulation of communication skills. An important requirement for learner engagement with remotely facilitated simulation-based training is the development of contextual understanding, multiple exposures and a respectful learner-teacher relationship. Any negative impact of remotely facilitated simulation-based training may be concealed by an overarching high perceived value of simulation-based trainings in general. This pilot online simulation programme shows the value of using this modality and lays the foundation for communication skills teaching during future disasters. There is the need to consider how online simulation can be sustained after the pandemic and not just returning to the conventional face-to-face teaching and learning

Virtual and Augmented Reality in Medical Education

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are two contemporary simulation models that are currently upgrading medical education. VR provides a 3D and dynamic view of structures and the ability of the user to interact with them. The recent technological advances in haptics, display systems, and motion detection allow the user to have a realistic and interactive experience, enabling VR to be ideal for training in hands-on procedures. Consequently, surgical and other interventional procedures are the main fields of application of VR. AR provides the ability of projecting virtual information and structures over physical objects, thus enhancing or altering the real environment. The integration of AR applications in the understanding of anatomical structures and physiological mechanisms seems to be beneficial. Studies have tried to demonstrate the validity and educational effect of many VR and AR applications, in many different areas, employed via various hardware platforms. Some of them even propose a curriculum that integrates these methods. This chapter provides a brief history of VR and AR in medicine, as well as the principles and standards of their function. Finally, the studies that show the effect of the implementation of these methods in different fields of medical training are summarized and presented