Games for Health 2006: Pulse!! First-Person Healthcare System Simulation - Erin Hoffman
Doug Whatley, CEO of Breakaway Games, and Dr. Claudia Johnston of Texas A&M addressed the Games for Health 2006 conference on their cross-disciplinary Pulse!! project, a comprehensive medical simulator. Pulse!! is described as a “state-of-the-art high-fidelity first person learning platform that dynamically responds to real-world contextual inputs” – software with the capability to simulate virtually every aspect of the surgical process. Dr. Johnston cited the looming doctor and RN shortages as well as care delivery pattern changes as the primary challenges facing the patient healthcare system today. Previously, the long period of time patients would spend in the hospital gave doctors the ability to use their bodies as what Johnston called “a living laboratory,” learning about the body’s systems and observing the recovery process. With the high speed and traffic of hospitals, that knowledge is being lost. Today, 98,000 errors are made annually in the care delivery system, 54,000 of which result in deaths. Additionally, modern warfare technology produces a greatly reduced rate of battlefield fatalities, but a greatly increased rate of combat wounds; half of the US wounded return to duty in 72 hours, while the other half enter hospitals. In many cases these soldiers have wounds that in previous times would have been fatal, so recovery care faces entirely new challenges. Bioterrorism and avian flu, along with other rising epidemics, also present new concerns to the medical community that will become increasingly critical in the coming years. The principle of Pulse!! centers around a quotation that Dr. Johnston reiterated: “You can kill as many people as you need in virtual reality in order to harm no one in real life.” In it, individuals, usually medical students, take on the role of a physician or nurse and play through scenarios as one would in an MMOG. In addressing the medical community, Dr. Johnston said that they were “trying to move people to use word ‘learning platform’ than ‘game’. When you speak of funding, it resonates more to speak of ‘learning platforms’ than ‘games’.”
Pulse!!’s strength centers in its ability to provide case-based learning and training. In its final iteration, the developers intend that clinicians should be able to set up a case in the simulator in a matter of minutes, enabling a medical team to run through emergency surgery while the patient is being transferred to the hospital. A principle that Dr. Johnston described as “see one, practice many, do one, teach one” would thus yield decreased death rates. As Dr. Johnston finished her presentation, Doug Whatley took the podium to provide the audience with a tour of a Pulse!! scenario, activating a virtual setup modeled precisely after the emergency ward of their participating hospital. The scenario involved the treatment of a US soldier recently arrived from the field, presented in stunning detail. Whatley emphasized the full interactivity of the simulated environment, from the transparency of container textures (necessary for doctors to inspect contents at a glance) to the functionality of simulated computer consoles.
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