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November 13, 2007, 02:03 PM ET
To Save a Second Life
Before practicing medicine on real patients, nursing students at Tacoma Community College, in Washington, get to practice on virtual ones in the computer-generated world of Second Life. John Miller, a nursing instructor at Tacoma, put on a live demonstration here at the League for Innovation in the Community College’s technology conference for an eager crowd.
It wasn’t quite as sexy as Grey’s Anatomy, but it worked. Mr. Miller played the role of the patient, directing his avatar to lie on a hospital bed in the virtual emergency room. The avatars of two of his students, both of whom were participating remotely, entered the room to treat the patient. Their voices were transmitted over the Internet for the audience to hear.
Mr. Miller told the two students he was suffering from chest pains. The students asked typical medical questions, inquiring how bad the pain was and whether he had a history of heart problems, while their avatars on the screen hooked up an IV and attached a blood-pressure cuff. Mr. Miller fed information to the program to provide the blood-pressure reading and an electrocardiogram readout.
“This is where I get worse,” Mr. Miller told the conference attendants. His avatar then went into cardiac arrest, and the students had to react by giving CPR and providing electrical defibrillation, all of which took place on-screen.
The demonstration ran into a few hitches, however. The patient’s heart rhythm did not immediately react to the defibrillation, as it was supposed to. And at one point the patient’s arm disappeared and one of the nursing students inadvertently flew out of the room.
But the virtual world gives nursing students a chance to practice their medical procedures on their own, Mr. Miller said. It doesn’t replace traditional learning or the live simulations at the college, but it does provide another method of practice.
“If you want to learn how to start an IV, for example, Second Life is probably not the best place,” Mr. Miller said. “But it is good for other things.” —Dan Carnevale
Categories: Virtual-Worlds, Teaching
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