The College of

Arts and Sciences

This NSF project involves the creation of a HCI based design of Virtual Reality/Mixed Reality based simulation environment sto support training of first responders including nurses in hospitals, communities and cities in the US in order to respond more effectively to the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Currently, there is an urgent need to train such responders (nurses, physician assistants and others) to perform the screening/testing activities in a methodical, safe and efficient manner. 3D Digital twins of swab testing environments and ventilator hookup activities have been designed, validated and introduced in hospitals and nursing educational programs.

This project seeks to increase the pool of first responders involved in COVID-19 testing  as well as develop a more effective process to train and prepare such first responders. This project explores the role of Human Centered Computing (HCC) principles and factors (such as affordance and cognitive load) on the design of the simulation based training environments. An information centric process model (ICPM) was created as part of a participatory design process, which provided a robust foundation to design and build the 3D digital twin. Our partners include Yavapai Medical Center and several nurse training programs in Arizona and Oklahoma. Several cohorts of nurses in Houston, Dallas, Prescott (AZ) and Enid/Stillwater (OK) played a key role in sharing their knowledge as well as in verifying and validating the 3D digital twins.

 

With the number of COVID-19 patients continuing to increase rapidly, it is critical that the Nation have a larger pool of trained first responders.  The creation of such a Virtual Reality training simulator will address this urgent need. This innovative simulator will provide a user-friendly and effective training experience for the nurses and other health care assistants to perform various triage related screening and testing activities. An interdisciplinary team of researchers including first responders, nurses and triage coordinators (from a hospital partner) will collaborate in a unique participatory design based approach to designing and building this training simulator. With the involvement of Covid-19 first responders and medical specialists, an information centric process model (ICPM) will be created, that captures the functional and temporal relationships of various activities involved in the triage based patient interaction process including screening, testing and treatment. The creation of such an ICPM will provide a robust and structured foundation to create the simulation environments, which will be distributed to hospitals nationwide.