WiVR founding member Fee Berry, project manager at UK-based e-learning company Mediverse, was quoted in a Network World story about how virtual reality is transforming health care.
The March 28 article, written by WiVR’s Maria Korolov, was also reprinted by CIO and other business and technology publications.
From the article:
Medical students need to practice deciding when to give rapid tranquilization to patients in a mental health ward.
“It’s something they couldn’t do legally in real life with real patients,” said Fee Berry, project manager at Mediverse. “And it’s quite hard to set up a real-life simulation of that kind of thing — it’s quite expensive to get actors to play the patients. In the virtual world, it’s quite an easy thing to do.”
Berry is currently working with the UK’s National Health Service on the project. Currently, one trainee plays the virtual patient, while other trainees play the doctor or nurse. “It’s one of the things that people don’t expect from virtual reality — that you identify pretty strongly with your avatar and you see things from their perspective,” she says. “If you are a doctor, it is a useful thing to have seen the simulation from the patient\’s perspective and the nurse’s perspective.”
In addition, avatar behaviors can be recorded and automated, in the form of bots, where the computer controls the other characters. Bots are already being used to populate the virtual setting with other patients and staff, she says.