READ

How virtual reality is preparing West Aussie paramedics

A bus driver has a heart attack, veering off the road and crashing into a building site. Many passengers are injured, and the clock is ticking. Who should you treat first?
Megan Pusey
Megan Pusey
Freelance writer
How virtual reality is preparing West Aussie paramedics
Image credit: Jess Watson, ECU

That’s a mass casualty scenario the next wave of WA paramedics will face in a new virtual reality (VR) program developed by ECU.

Mass casualty incidents can have natural causes, like an earthquake, or man-made, like a terrorist attack. Either way, they’re stressful for first responders.

Textbooks can’t really prepare paramedics for these kinds of events, which is where immersive simulations come into play.

Preparing for the worst, virtually

Traditionally, student paramedics undertake live simulations treating actors with gory but fake injuries.

Dr Brennen Mills is a lecturer at ECU who says realistic blood and wounds and screaming can be confronting but is important for real-world preparation.

“It really ups that cognitive burden, and your cognitive processing starts to go out the window,” says Brennen.

The cost of these exercises means they’re only offered once or twice a year, but new VR programs are making authentic learning experiences more accessible.

Virtual reality screen capture of mass casualty situation where a man has been impaled by a pole
View Larger

Using the triage process to categorise patients

Image credit: Jess Watson, ECU
Using the triage process to categorise patients

Turning to virtual technology

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from ECU created the Mass Casualty Triage VR Simulator.

“[The VR simulation] allows students to practise those skills … then they can consolidate that learning when they’re put into the more realistic event,” Brennen says.

“The risk is that, if you throw them straight into [the real-life simulation], they’re going to be so overwhelmed they’re not going to learn anything.”

An early version of the Mass Casualty Virtual Reality Simulation developed with the School of Medical and Health Science using motion capture

Video credit: ECU
An early version of the Mass Casualty Virtual Reality Simulation developed with the School of Medical and Health Science using motion capture

Virtual triage

While VR has its drawbacks, such as users not being able to physically touch their patients, the benefit is practising triage.

Triage refers to the assessment of patient casualties to decide their order of treatment. In the VR simulation, users assess and categorise patients then get feedback on their speed and skill.

Users are often surprised by the simulation’s authenticity and realism.

Jess Watson, a motion capture technician at ECU, helped with the project. It featured Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts students performing scenarios and motion capture technology.

Two images showing motion capture of a person bending down, where movement is depicted by different coloured light
View Larger

Using motion capture technology

Image credit: Jess Watson, ECU
Using motion capture technology

“Players felt immersed enough that they were having real conversations with the virtual patients, saying things like, ‘It’s OK, I’m going to come back’,” says Jess.

Inciting innovation

The simulator won the Most Transformative Impact in Education category of the 2019 INCITE Awards and the ECU Vice-Chancellor’s Inspirational Team Award.

WOman wearing a virtual reality headset and testing controls
View Larger

Using the VR simulation

Image credit: Jess Watson, ECU
Using the VR simulation

Jess credits this success to the collaborative approach across many disciplines.

It’s also received interest from across the health and medical industry.

“We have aspirations to continually add to the program and create more scenarios and assets,” Brennen says.

“This will make it even more relevant to other health and medical organisations.”

Megan Pusey
About the author
Megan Pusey
Megan is a science educator and communicator. She is one-third of the podcast Press X to Science which explores the intersection between gaming and science. Megan is a tech enthusiast and loves exploring learning through games. Her favourite video game is The Witness.
View articles
Megan is a science educator and communicator. She is one-third of the podcast Press X to Science which explores the intersection between gaming and science. Megan is a tech enthusiast and loves exploring learning through games. Her favourite video game is The Witness.
View articles

NEXT ARTICLE

We've got chemistry, let's take it to the next level!

Get the latest WA science news delivered to your inbox, every fortnight.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Republish

Creative Commons Logo

Republishing our content

We want our stories to be shared and seen by as many people as possible.

Therefore, unless it says otherwise, copyright on the stories on Particle belongs to Scitech and they are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This allows you to republish our articles online or in print for free. You just need to credit us and link to us, and you can’t edit our material or sell it separately.

Using the ‘republish’ button on our website is the easiest way to meet our guidelines.

Guidelines

You cannot edit the article.

When republishing, you have to credit our authors, ideally in the byline. You have to credit Particle with a link back to the original publication on Particle.

If you’re republishing online, you must use our pageview counter, link to us and include links from our story. Our page view counter is a small pixel-ping (invisible to the eye) that allows us to know when our content is republished. It’s a condition of our guidelines that you include our counter. If you use the ‘republish’ then you’ll capture our page counter.

If you’re republishing in print, please email us to let us so we know about it (we get very proud to see our work republished) and you must include the Particle logo next to the credits. Download logo here.

If you wish to republish all our stories, please contact us directly to discuss this opportunity.

Images

Most of the images used on Particle are copyright of the photographer who made them.

It is your responsibility to confirm that you’re licensed to republish images in our articles.

Video

All Particle videos can be accessed through YouTube under the Standard YouTube Licence.

The Standard YouTube licence

  1. This licence is ‘All Rights Reserved’, granting provisions for YouTube to display the content, and YouTube’s visitors to stream the content. This means that the content may be streamed from YouTube but specifically forbids downloading, adaptation, and redistribution, except where otherwise licensed. When uploading your content to YouTube it will automatically use the Standard YouTube licence. You can check this by clicking on Advanced Settings and looking at the dropdown box ‘License and rights ownership’.
  2. When a user is uploading a video he has license options that he can choose from. The first option is “standard YouTube License” which means that you grant the broadcasting rights to YouTube. This essentially means that your video can only be accessed from YouTube for watching purpose and cannot be reproduced or distributed in any other form without your consent.

Contact

For more information about using our content, email us: particle@scitech.org.au

Copy this HTML into your CMS
Press Ctrl+C to copy