Games for Health 2006: Pulse!! First-Person Healthcare System Simulation - Erin Hoffman
The Pulse!! instruction principle also expands formerly esoteric medical teaching methods. By enabling students to practice in virtual space, instructors would be able to test according to aptitude, rather than requiring students so stay through a full semester of instruction when they had already provably mastered techniques. “We are taking existing pedagogy and delivering it in a totally unique way,” Dr. Johnston said. In terms of technology, the Pulse!! development environment utilizes the same equipment used to create Gollum in Lord of the Rings, and advanced motion capture. Some issues remain to be resolved; the movement and behavior of blood in the human body is currently too complex for existing game engines, and accuracy of this performance was critical to the program. The project faced other challenges. Because the development team was so widely interdisciplinary, terminology became an issue. Language terms such as a “file” might mean three different things to a game developer, a researcher, and a clinician. Still, Dr. Johnston emphasized that all participants were seeking to move the technology “one step closer to the 'holodeck', because that’s where we’re all going.” Those associated with the program had tremendous enthusiasm for their cause and their team. Dr. Johnston lauded the program’s congressional support and the talents of those who had developed the software. She also said that she felt “hugely privileged to work with the National Naval Medical Center,” describing them as “a fabulous group of people to work with.”
In the future, Johnston said that she believes that the medical community needs to work toward building “a national agenda for modeling and simulation”, ensuring that dedicated funds are available at a national level when researchers approach the government with proposals for simulation projects. On a local level, she said that her team would be pursuing multi-institution validation studies, and working to integrate simulation at all curricula levels in the health profession. She emphasized the importance of cost-benefit analysis through this process, and appropriate allocation of researcher energy. The principles expressed at Johnston and Whatley’s presentation, and their achieved implementation thus far, provided an inspiring update on the state of medical simulation, with the implications that we are fast approaching an entirely new way to teach medicine.
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