Virtual Reality Simulator for Medical Auscultation Training

Abstract

According to the Oxford English dictionary, auscultation is “the action of listening to sounds from the heart, lungs, or other organs, typically with a stethoscope, as a part of medical diagnosis.” In this work, we describe a medical simulator that includes audio, visual, pseudo-haptic, and spatial elements for training medical students in auscultation. In our training simulator, the user is fully immersed in a virtual reality (VR) environment. A typical hospital bedside scenario was recreated, and the users can see their own body and the patient increase immersion. External tracking devices are used to acquire the user’s movements and map them into the VR environment. The main idea behind this work is for the user to associate the heart and lung sounds, as heard through the stethoscope with the corresponding health-related problems. Several sound parameters including the volume, give information about the type and severity of the disease. Our simulator can reproduce sounds belonging to the heart and lungs. Through the proposed VR-based training, the medical student ideally will learn to relate sounds to illnesses in a realistic setting, accelerating the learning process.