OSCase: Data Schemes, Architecture and Implementation details of Virtual Patient repurposing in Multi User Virtual Environments.

P E Antoniou,L Ioannidis,P D Bamidis

doi:10.4108/eai.27-6-2016.151523

Abstract

Experiential game based learning has proven effective at engaging and enabling learners especially in medical education where the volume of the curriculum is as severe as its criticality. A mature and promising ICT tool for medical education is the Virtual Patient (VP). Web-based virtual patients h

Highlights

Medical educational content explosion [1] combined with the crucial character of the healthcare subject matter, has led educational endeavors to turn towards novel and more diverse resources, means and activities including the digital [2]
With the transition from the Web to the virtual environment not a pedagogically straightforward one there have been the need to explore the necessities of the Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) platform through user feedback
Moving to the technical specifics of the aforementioned efforts, on an attempt to incorporate the 2 aforementioned axes of research, the virtual patient repurposing from the Web to the 3D virtual environment and the automation by semantification of content generated in 3D virtual environments, the present work aims to provide a credible proof of concept, with key implemented components, for a framework that can incorporate these media and standards’ advances

Summary

Introduction

Medical educational content explosion [1] combined with the crucial character of the healthcare subject matter, has led educational endeavors to turn towards novel and more diverse resources, means and activities including the digital [2]. These features of OLabX both separate it from the core version and provide the contextual background in which the repurposing to MUVEs is implemented Adding in this the scheme’s open architecture through established existing vocabularies (a feature ensuring OLabX’s extendibility through implicit RDF referencing, for details cf [14]) it provides an even more rigorous set of constraints for streamlined MUVE transfer facilitation of VPs. The efforts taken for transferring virtual patients on different presentation platforms consist of the “crossenvironment” migration of VPs from the Web to MUVEs. Beginning with a simple manual transfer these repurposing efforts included both a dental VP [49] and initial cases for training scenarios of elderly care training [68]. In order to evolve the architecture and the data scheme that would facilitate repurposing of web based VPs in a 3D virtual environment a standard serialization for the description of this VP in the context of a standard OS point and click VP “adventure” was developed To test this prototype serialization, a tree of static webpages containing a whole virtual case was created. In the previous sections the repurposing of VPs from the web to the MUVE, as well as the streamlining of their data serialization has been described to provide context to the effort being made currently to automate the transfer and linking of OLab resources to the OS MUVE

The OS Case Datascheme

Utilizing the OSCase Datascheme

Discussion