Virtual Reality Training Application to Prepare Medical Student's for Their First Operating Room Experience
Armin Gruenewald, Ricardo de O. Schmidt, Lukas Sayn, Christian Gieber, Tanja Joan Eiler, Vanessa Schmuecker, Veit Braun, Rainer Brueck
Abstract
Medical students are often overwhelmed when they visit the operating room (OR) for the first time to witness e.g. a surgical intervention. In order to reduce the student's anxieties and to prepare them for the visit, in this paper a virtual reality application is presented, which enhances traditional training in a hybrid course design. In this application, medical students virtually walk through the different steps of OR-preparation (putting on surgical clothes, perform a surgical hand disinfection). After that, they arrive in a virtual operating room, where they have to endure periods of stillness without contaminating themselves as well as performing a simple task such as the preparatory washing of a surgical site on a patient's leg. To foster self-guided learning, a head-up display guides the students through the different tasks and thus minimizes the supervisor's need to intervene. The hybrid course format was assessed highly positive in a small pilot study of five students and the students indicated, that they now felt better prepared for their next OR visit. This shows that integrating virtual reality in an educational setting, especially for specific topics such as medical education as presented in this paper, can be very beneficial and forward-looking.