V℞ – CSE Senior Design

Team Name

V℞

Timeline

Spring 2019 – Summer 2019

Students

Garrison Geaslin
Zach Whitteberry
Courtney Howland
Brandon Keen
Emmanuel Rocha

Abstract

Often, nurses lack the training needed to cope with the emotional trauma of palliative care. Training simulations currently used by the nursing department at the University of Texas at Arlington do not provide an emotional experience that is realistic enough to prepare the nursing students for the emotional toll of palliative care. With a more realistic simulation, nursing students will be more prepared to care for terminally ill patients. The simulation will be able to support at least two environments, the hospital environment and the home environment. Each environment represents stages of the patients decline from admittance to death. These stages will include scenarios of 10 to 12 critical points for Junior 1, Junior 2, Senior 1, and Senior 2 students. These critical points will test both technical and social skills regarding the patient and will require the students to interact with the avatar and critical equipment throughout the environment.

Background

The Nursing Department lacks realistic training simulations for palliative care. Their current solution, vSim, has been criticized for its unrealistic implementation and lack of training in social interactions with the patient. Simply put, nurses do not develop a relationship with the vSim patient in the same way they would develop a relationship with a patient in a real work scenario. Therefore, many nurses are unprepared for the emotional toll that caring for a terminally ill patient can have on them. In order to mitigate this issue, the Nursing and Education Departments at the University of Texas at Arlington have requested a virtual reality solution. The Nursing Department will be able to make better use of a virtual reality solution as the program will be able to be more realistic than vSim, and focus more on the social aspect of healthcare as well. The Education Department will be able to use a virtual reality solution as well, as the program will be expandable. In other words, by building and utilizing different assets, the simulation can be used to train students in other departments. Ultimately, VRx will be developing the base platform for this virtual reality simulation so that it may be expanded upon by future developers.

The sponsors for this project are Jennifer Roye of the Nursing Department and RaeAnna Jeffers of the Education Department. The relationship between the sponsors and the development team is purely professional, and no member of the development team previously knew either of the sponsors. Jennifer Roye is sponsoring the project due to the Nursing Department’s need for a better training simulation for palliative care. RaeAnna Jeffers is sponsoring the project due to the need for better training simulations for every Department at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Project Requirements

The hospice environment is completed (IV flush, morphine, headwall, phone, patient, bed for patient, sink, soap, paper, sterilization equipment)
Simulation verifies that student (player) identifies themselves to the patient (NPC) on entry to room
Simulation verifies that student verifies identity of the patient, both through speaking to the patient and looking at the patient’s armband
Simulation verifies that student performs appropriate hand hygiene (washes their hands) when entering and exiting from the room
Simulation verifies that student takes vital signs of patient using vitals monitor
Simulation verifies that student assesses lung sounds, heart sounds, circulation, abdomen, and performs a neuro assessment on the patient
Simulation verifies that the student assesses pain score using 0-10 scale
Simulation verifies that the student performs an IV site assessment
Simulation verifies that the student makes the correct SBAR assessment
Simulation ensures that medication was properly administered to the patient

System Overview

The Goal of this project is to simulate palliative care and social interactions in a virtual environment. To that end, virtual reality was chosen as a means of presence and interaction within the simulation. We chose to use the HTC Vive as the peripheral and Unity as the development engine. The Vive is composed of the headset which will be the users view into the simulation and the Vive controllers which will be how the user will interact with the simulation environment. Unity will consist of the many scripts, assets and scenes that will be created for the simulation and run as the engine putting everything together.

For the simulation itself, the user will be placed in a environment, a hospital room or the patients residence. The user will then have to attempt to clear several critical points to proceed through the simulation. The user will be graded upon completion of the scenario and be given a grade based on there performance on each critical point.

To make the scenario as realistic as possible we will need to make a detailed environment for the user to interact in. This will include things such as a working sink, cabinets, and system readings. These interactions need to be included to include a believable experience to the user. We will also need to make the social interactions with the patient as realistic as possible, to that end we will need several animations and voice overs to be able to interact realistically with the user. Other interactions will be included but the main interactions will be with the patient.

The system will be expandable as it will need to be a toolbox for future developers to use to further craft on top of this project and to possibly start new ones.

Results

In the current state of the simulation, all critical interactions are able to be performed by the student and verified by the simulation. The fundamental functionality has been completed and can be extended in future iterations of the project. All assets necessary for the hospital environment have also been acquired or developed, and may be further developed in the future by adding animations for the assets. As all critical project requirements were met and the system is extensible, the project is considered to be a success. Below are a few screenshots and a demo video.