An Augmented Reality System For Expanding Abnormalities of Standardized Patients

Abstract

Standardized patients (SPs), individuals who realistically portray patients, are widely used in medical education to teach and assess students' skill in communicating with patient, eliciting a history, performing a physical exam, and others. They are typically healthy individuals with few or no abnormal physical findings. One limitation is that each SP can only portray a limited set of physical symptoms. We have developed a functioning prototype that uses sound -based augmented reality (AR) to expand the capabilities of an SP to exhibit physically -manifested abnormalities. Our current research using augmented reality technology allows the learner to view an abnormal virtual 3D heart on a normal SP's body in our simulated echocardiogram. I. Int roduction To become clinically competent physicians, medical students must develop knowledge and skills in many areas of both the art and science of medicine. Three areas are emphasized in medical students' early clinical training: communicating with a pa tient, eliciting the history, and performing the physical exam. Standardized patients (SPs), individuals trained to realistically portray patients, are commonly used to teach and assess medical students in those three areas. Working with SPs provides stud ents the opportunity to learn these and other clinical skills in a safe setting. SPs also provide a way to reliably test students' clinical skills in a realistic setting, interacting with a person. The range of clinical problems that an SP can portray, how ever, is limited. They are typically healthy individuals with few or no abnormal physical findings. While some can be trained to simulate physical abnormalities (e.g., breathing through one lung, voluntarily increasing blood pressure, etc.), there are many abnormalities that they cannot simulate. The previous phase of this research involves simulating abnormal sounds in an SP, thus expanding the breadth of sounds that can be heard in an SP. A learner will listen to an SP's heart and lungs through a modified electric stethoscope and hear pre -recorded sounds rather than the SP's. This work has been documented in paper (1) and (2). Current research for expanding abnormal SP symptoms focus on simulating unhealthy medical images. So far, we have created an augmen ted reality system for registering a simulated medical image on the human body (SP). This system allows the learner to view various virtual 3D organs based on their corresponding locations. Different views of a 3D organ are generated by the movement of lea rner's head and position of learner with regard to the SP.