Virtual reality for ambulance simulation environment

2020

BACKGROUND Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used as simulation technology in emergency medicine education and training, in particular for training nontechnical skills. Experimental studies comparing teaching and learning in VR with traditional training media often demonstrate the equivalence or even superiority regarding particular variables of learning or training effectiveness. OBJECTIVE In the EPICSAVE (Enhanced Paramedic Vocational Training with Serious Games and Virtual Environments) project, a highly immersive room-scaled multi-user 3-dimensional VR simulation environment was developed. In this feasibility study, we wanted to gain initial insights into the training effectiveness and media use factors influencing learning and training in VR. METHODS The virtual emergency scenario was anaphylaxis grade III with shock, swelling of the upper and lower respiratory tract, as well as skin symptoms in a 5-year-old girl (virtual patient) visiting an indoor family amusement park wit...

Academic Emergency Medicine, 2002

The traditional system of clinical education in emergency medicine relies on practicing diagnostic, therapeutic, and procedural skills on live patients. The ethical, financial, and practical weaknesses of this system are well recognized, but the alternatives that have been explored to date have shown even greater flaws. However, ongoing progress in the area of virtual reality and computer-enhanced simulation is now providing educational applications that show tremendous promise in overcoming most of the deficiencies associated with live-patient training. It will be important for academic emergency physicians to become more involved with this technology to ensure that our educational system benefits optimally.

Presence: Vol. 9, No. 6

This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed virtual reality (VR) platform that was developed to support the training of multiple users who must perform complex tasks in which situation assessment and critical thinking are the primary components of success. The system is fully immersive and multimodal, and users are represented as tracked, full-body figures. The system supports the manipulation of virtual objects, allowing users to act upon the environment in a natural manner. The underlying intelligent simulation component creates an interactive, responsive world in which the consequences of such actions are presented within a realistic, time-critical scenario. The focus of this work has been on the training of medical emergency-response personnel. BioSimMER, an application of the system to training first responders to an act of bio-terrorism, has been implemented and is presented throughout the paper as a concrete example of how the underlying platform architecture supports complex training tasks. Finally, a preliminary field study was performed at the Texas Engineering Extension Service Fire Protection Training Division. The study focused on individual, rather than team, interaction with the system and was designed to gauge user acceptance of VR as a training tool. The results of this study are presented.

Multicasualty triage, establishing the priority of care among casualties in disaster management, is generally practiced using constructive tabletop or live exercises. Live exercises require scheduling of medical providers, trained actors, and frequently focus on organizational and logistical issues, with little practice of medical response. Actual disasters, such as explosions, hurricanes, or toxic exposures, occur so rarely that there is little opportunity for gaining experience during real events.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Emergency Management Towards Co-operation and Global Harmonization (TIEMS 2001)

This paper discusses the current state of the art of virtual reality (VR) technology within the context emergency operation support and training. Recent widely reported fatal road and railway tunnel accidents (e.g. Mont Blanc, Kaprun) have highlighted the problems that arise when evacuating people to safety in the event of a fire in a confined space with limited exit possibilities. Similar problems arise in the evacuation of aircraft and high-speed trains or subways. In order to improve preparedness plans, it is necessary to develop rescue scenarios to ascertain the fire safety and to train rescue personnel by simulation of fire emergencies. The integration of VR technology with traditional geographical information systems and tools for managing emergency procedures is particularly interesting from both a decision support and training perspective. A VR interface could either replace a conventional 2D interface or complement it, depending on user requirements. This paper proposes VR methodologies as the only feasible alternative to full-scale fire tests inside tunnels. In a computer simulation-based virtual environment, all data about infrastructure, safety equipment, ventilation resources, fire and smoke propagation, and vehicle/passengers involvement could be managed by a single database. Fire and smoke simulation tools as well as computerised emergency procedures, acting on the virtual data, could also be integrated in such a system and utilised for training support by the emergency operators.

Applied Sciences

This paper presents the design of a virtual reality learning module inspired by the exercises of healthcare professionals and its limitations as a result of action research carried out by the authors’ collective. The module is implemented on a car crash scenario as a emergency event. Virtual reality training is presented here as an important supplement to traditional paramedic training with the potential to reduce costs and make paramedic training more effective as part of their refresher training for their job roles. Real-time training and its limitations are described, especially regarding patient triage, this aspect being considered as one of the key aspects in the context of virtual reality. Furthermore, the results of a questionnaire survey among the mannequins and interviews with the trainees are presented, while the virtual reality environment of the module was designed to be intuitive for each student with the possibility of self-service without major demands on the logistic...

Journal For Virtual Worlds Research

Virtual reality simulation may significantly benefit a geographically dispersed learner demographic in the medical outpatient setting. Our research used an immersive virtual reality platform as a novel way to recreate high-risk medical scenarios targeted for office-based emergencies. Using a design-based research approach we designed virtual-reality-based simulation scenarios to prepare interprofessional office personnel for emergencies. Learners were connected using laptop computers, via a browser interface, with learner controlled team member avatars and educator controlled patient avatars. The virtual environment was modeled after a multi-provider healthcare office setting in a large suburban health network. Evaluation occurred via post-event surveys and feedback transcribed from video recordings and debriefings. Three office-based emergency scenarios were created (chest pain, respiratory distress/allergic reaction, and suicidal risk), with progressively smaller changes to the vi...

This paper discusses the design and prototypical implementation of virtual patients to train paramedics in disaster operations. These virtual patients are presented on a multi-touch table top. The current approach focuses on disaster triage according to the mSTaRT triage algorithm. In order to enhance disaster preparedness continuous training of all paramedics is indispensable. Due to the fact that large disaster control exercises are laborious and expensive, training on a small scale makes sense. The presented approach includes gesture based interactions to simulate the patients as realistically as possible. This more intuitive interaction results in a more realistic simulation of the patient and a better preparation for the real situation.

Research Square (Research Square), 2024

To minimize loss of life, modern mass casualty response requires swift identi cation, e cient triage categorization, and rapid hemorrhage control. Current training methods remain suboptimal. Our objective was to train rst responders to triage a mass casualty incident using Virtual Reality (VR) simulation and obtain their impressions of the training's quality and effectiveness. We trained subjects in a triage protocol called Sort, Assess, Lifesaving interventions, and Treatment and/or Transport (SALT) Triage then had them respond to a terrorist bombing of a subway station using a fully immersive VR simulation. We gathered learner reactions to their VR experience and post-encounter debrie ng with a custom electronic survey. The survey was designed to gather information about participants' demographics and prior experience, including roles, triage training, and VR experience. We then asked them to evaluate the training and encounter and the system's potential for training others. Nearly 400 subjects experienced the VR encounter and completed evaluation surveys. Subjects were primarily paramedics, but also included medical learners as well as other emergency medical service (EMS) professionals. Most participants (95%) recommended the experience for other rst responders and rated the simulation (95%) and virtual patients (91%) as realistic. Ninety-four percent of participants rated the VR simulator as "excellent" or "good." We observed some differences between emergency medical service and medical professionals with regard to their prior experience with disaster response training and their opinions on how much the experience contributed to their learning. We observed no differences between subjects with extensive VR experience and those without. Our VR simulator is an automated, customizable, fully immersive virtual reality system for training and assessing personnel in the proper response to a mass casualty incident. Participants perceived the simulator as an adequate alternative to traditional triage and treatment training and believed that the simulator was realistic and effective for training. Prior experience with virtual reality was not a prerequisite for the use of this system.

Proceedings of International Scientific Conference on Telecommunications, Computing and Control, 2021

Digital technologies have a significant impact on medical training. Growing popularity of virtual and augmented reality changes the trend into virtual simulators. We gave an overview of key market products in the field of medical simulators in order to define main aspects for development of our own system. These aspects are: open surgery, realistic visualization, and haptic feedback. We described in details each of them and how it was implemented in our system. For open surgery was used appendectomy as most common procedure of this type of the surgery. In order to achieve realistic visualization, we implemented three different approaches for creating realistic and accurate 3D models. For haptic feedback, we took Novint Falcon and enhanced it with our custom grip which provides additional degrees of freedom.