e-Guidance in Riga

I spoke from within Second Life at the 6th European Conference on e-Guidance

Waiting to speak at Riga. Autocue in front of me and Robin hiding behind screen to appear at the appointed time.

on Widening Access to Lifelong Guidance using the Virtual World of Second Life. Here is an abstract of my talk where I asserted that simulated workplaces can be used at all stages of an individual’s career to give them access to work-like experiences and environments that are difficult, costly or hazardous to visit in RL. For example a class can meet and interact with real hospital staff in their simulated hospital whereas a visit to a real hospital would be restricted in many ways. With the assistance of Raimo Vuorinen of University of Jyväskylä in Finland (in RL), Robin Winter (Imperial College) and Jaana Kettunen (Finland) – both in SL, I illustrated my talk by touring around one of our virtual hospital wards and took questions from the RL audience in Riga. I was originally invited to give this talk in Riga but decided it would be more effective and saved the EU almost 1000 Euros for me to use Second Life instead.

The conference was jointly organized by the ELPGN – European Lifelong Guidance Policy Network and by the eGOS project with the support of the European Commission through the Lifelong Learning and CIP programmes.

Our Showcase Entry

Medical School is in the Scilands

Medical School is now listed in the Linden Lab Showcase, leading to an instant increase in visitor numbers. The island incorporates the Immersive Clinical Scenario that was a finalist in the Linden Prize and is featured in 2nd place in the Showcase’s Education category. Our other projects are all listed here.

Patient Experience in Brighton

Taking Blood Pressure

We are currently developing a patient-centred virtual world experience intended to help NHS staff gain valid consent from patients with learning disability. People with learning disabilities learn best from multimodal experiences and immersive virtual reality has been shown to support learning. We will use a virtual hospital experience to discover if we can enhance recall and understanding. After exposure the user’s understanding will be tested by a form of non-directive interview technique. The Economist has just run an article (requiring subscription) on the study featuring our partners at the University of Brighton, Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and the Grace Eyre Foundation.

This work is funded by the NIHR Invention for Innovation (i4i) programme.

Virtual Worlds and Inflatable Operating Theatres at NHS Innovations Expo

Lord Darzi's Keynote

Lord Darzi addressed a packed auditorium at NHS Innovations Expo this week. The evidence shows that those organisations that are open to innovation are more cost effective and deliver higher quality care than those that lag behind the adoption curve.

I would like to report on the other speakers and workshops at this incredible event, and on the myriad of innovations that were showcased for 2 days in the London Docklands to thousands of visitors, but my colleagues and I were constantly busy demonstrating Imperial College’s innovations including robotic beating heart surgery, the inflatable operating theatre, an improved resuscitation “crash” trolley and of course our virtual operating theatres and wards in Second Life.

More of Imperial’s innovations at the Expo including a movie can be seen here.

The Government has made available a £220 million innovation fund to help get innovative ideas supported and implemented, and to back that up the regional Strategic Health Authorities now have a legal duty to promote innovation in their organisations. My blog is entitled ‘Virtual World Innovations’ because I believe that they provide a fantastic environment for people to share their innovations, as well as enabling service innovations for the future. I spoke to many people at the Expo who agreed that the NHS islands in Second Life could provide a permanent Innovations Expo.

Watch this space!

Clinical scenarios – training in a safe environment

Medical devices are common technologies that the majority of healthcare professionals must be familiar with, and yet device associated incidents account for a significant proportion of medical errors. In this project the Department of Biosurgery and Surgical Technologies at Imperial College London designed, built and tested a scenario-based simulation in the 3D virtual world of Second Life. Our research illustrated the use of Second Life as a novel platform for immersive clinical training. Participants were able to learn and practice in a complex but safe environment where they could make mistakes without risk to any real patients. The project was awarded a ‘Special Mention’ by Linden Lab as an innovative virtual world project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily lives outside of the virtual world..

This walkthough illustrates the pilot project which was funded by NHS Training for Innovation: