Training of patient handover in virtual reality

Abstract

Patient handover is an important part for information transfer between medical professionals in a clinical setting. Yet, in current medical education, these conversations are only trained sparsely, since they are costly to perform as they take place in offsite courses and are led by experts over several days. Virtual reality (VR)-based training courses could increase the availability of training, by eliminating travel costs and reducing the time-commitment of the teaching experts. This work presents a VR prototype of a multi-user training and examination application for patient handover. To ensure a similar interaction quality to its current real world counterpart, this work used omni-directional video recordings to create a realistic setting and compared different projection methods. A pilot study highlighted distinct use-cases of sphere and mesh projections to visualize the recordings. The results suggest enhanced spatial presence relating to the usage of omni-directional videos in VR-applications.