ViTT: Towards a Virtual Reality System that Supports the Learning of Ergonomic Patient Transfers

Abstract

While patient transfers are part of nurses' daily work, the manual transfer of patients can also pose a major risk to nurses' health. The Kinaesthetics care conception may help nurses to conduct patient transfers more ergonomically. However, existing support to learn the concept is low. We introduce ViTT, a Virtual Reality system to promote the individual, self-directed learning of ergonomic patient transfers based on the Kinaesthetics care conception. The current implementation of ViTT supports a nurse in two phases: (i) instructions for a patient transfer, and (ii) training of the transfer with a virtual patient (based on a physics engine; implementation limited). In contrast to previous work, our approach provides an immersive experience that may allow for the ĝ€ safe' training of different transfer scenarios-e.g., patients with different impairments-and the study of different parameters that may influence nurses' learning experience-e.g., the simulation of stress-in the future.