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Low Cost Training VR Solutions for Nursing Students

Summer Placement Students: Gareth McGivern and Justin Yang (2008)

Supervisors from Electrical and Electronic Engineering: Dr K Rafferty and Dr S Ferguson

Supervisors from Nursing: Ms Karen Page, Mr Patrick Gallagher, Ms Aidin McKinney

Funding: Professor Jean Orr, School of Nursing

Summary

Virtual Environments (VEs) are one example of an advancing technology that has become useful in developing training strategies.  In fact, VEs are multifaceted and have the potential for individual and team training. VE technology immerses an individual or team in a perceptually realistic and interactive environment that is generated by a computer. 

The School of Nursing at Queen's University Belfast would like to utilise VEs in order to assist in the clinical and community training of their nursing students. This will enable nurses, and other health care professionals, to acquire and enhance key clinical and community decision making skills and thus potentially improve patient care. Using real anonymous clinical and community data, competencies can be developed and assessed through the students’ interaction with a distinctive blend of virtual interactions.

It is the purpose of this project to develop suitable content (3D models, and interactive scenarios) for a number of VEs that are designed to satisfy the training needs of student nurses at Queen's University Belfast.

  • Model Development:  3D models must be constructed to form the environment and participating characters for use within the interactive VEs. The VEs will be specified by the School of Nursing.  These models will be developed using Open FX or other similar package.

 

  • Interactive environment creation using Virtools: The generated models (forming the scenes of the virtual world) will then be used in the Virtools software package to build the interactive VE and its associated story-lines.