medical training

Hospital Care - Pulse!!

(Posted by: Admin on Jul 16, 2006)
Type: Health and Wellness 

Hospital Care - Pulse!!

Pulse!! is a virtual, clinical-training tool for medical and nursing students that borrows design and game-play elements from first-person shooter video games. The $4.3 million, federally funded medical-training project is a PC-based learning platform. Pulse!! is funded by the Office of Naval Research, and is designed by BreakAway, currently working on a proof-of-concept prototype that will be completed by the end of 2006. Eventually, it will be marketed to educational institutions as a PC-based training tool.
They began with a photorealistic model of the Bethesda Naval Hospital's Intensive Care Unit, which will serve as the virtual setting for the training tool. Students navigate through Pulse!! as if playing a first-person shooter, taking on the role of a health-care provider rather than looking onto a scene omnisciently. They talk and interact with a patient to discover what ails him.In the first virtual clinical case, a young soldier who has returned to the United States from Iraq is suffering from internal injuries sustained in an explosion. In future versions, players will encounter patients with detailed, biologically correct injuries that will, if all goes as planned, take blood spurts and severed limbs to new levels of realism.