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For decades, the US Air Force has effectively used Virtual Reality (VR) simulations for training and orienting cadets to combat and operational flight activities.
VR Flight Simulation applications provide a cost-effective educational experience for new and experienced military pilots to learn, train, practice and demonstrate their ground and in-flight emergency management decision-making skills and capabilities.
In the General Aviation world, Microsoft's Flight Simulator application provides realistic immersive flight training experiences that deliver many of the same benefits associated with military and commercial flight virtual reality training, at a significantly reduced cost with wider availability.
As a former Firefighter, Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Instructor, I was excited to learn about the VRpatientsTM platform developed by Virtual Education Systems.
Like a flight simulator for pilots, VRpatients immerses students into lifelike, stress-inducing educational scenarios that engages them to interview, assess, diagnose and treat patients in real time.
You can think of the VRpatients Web platform as a Learning Management System that provides a cost-effective, no-coding-required, virtual reality and web-based educational training experiences for emergency medicine providers and first responders.
The VRpatients platform empowers EMS educational content creators with tools to create and deploy patient care scenarios that can be used by Pre-hospital care providers to train, practice and demonstrate their proficiency in a realistic safe virtual environment.
VRpatients is an innovative physiologically based clinical training platform that immerses a healthcare provider or first responder into actual case scenarios, allowing them to interview, assess, diagnose, and treat patients in real-time.
Available through a web-based platform or an immersive clinical simulation experience complete with virtual reality goggles, VRpatients allows first responders and practitioners to test and expand their clinical competency skills and reduce the likelihood of clinical performance failure.
The web platform enables users to interact with lifelike simulated patients in a variety of medical scenarios, providing an immersive learning environment that offers an unparalleled level of realism.
Devin Marble, Director of Marketing for VRpatients explained that the platform provides EMS instructional creators with a toolset that is malleable and scalable. Educators can create a learning library of highly realistic educational animated experiences enabling users the freedom to explore the principles of patient assessment, triage, and management of trauma, medical, and environmental conditions.
Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs), First Responders, and other Pre-hospital Care professionals can use the platform to practice their decision-making and competency skills in a safe and controlled environment, free from the risks associated with real-world scenarios.
Simulating real-world emergency medical care scenarios using VRpatients can be a fun and effective means of transferring valuable skills to prehospital care professionals.
The Quest 2 VR headset has a large presence in the consumer VR market space, with many users that use the headset for professional applications and education, training, and orientation use cases.
Gamifying VRpatients for Quest 2 can be a fun, efficient and effective way to educate and train current EMS and pre-hospital care providers. Future generations of young adults dreaming of serving as emergency healthcare providers can also use a VRpatients Quest 2 to explore and learn about emergency medicine and first response management.
The Developer Mode on the Quest 2 store allows you to access and test pre-release version of VRpatients before its officially released on the store. This feature is designed for developers and application test and evaluators to support testing pre-release applications before they are available for public release.
To make the pre-release version of the VRpatients accessible in your Quest 2 Meta Store, you'll need to enable Developer Mode:
1. Download and install the Oculus app on your computer.
2. Open the Oculus app, and then click on "Settings" in the left-hand menu.
3. Click on the "General" tab, and then click on "Unknown Sources" to enable it.
4. Put on your Quest 2 headset and turn it on.
5. In the headset applications section, go to "Settings" and then "Device."
6. Scroll down to "Developer" and toggle on "Developer mode."
Once Developer Mode is enabled, VRpatients should display in the Meta store display. Click on the VRpatients icon to install it as you would install any other Quest 2 experience.
I recently had an opportunity to experience a developer release of the VRpatients for the Meta Quest 2 platform. Next up, I'll share my first impressions and tell you about some of the features and capabilities of the Quest 2 VRpatients in an upcoming column.
