Design and Prototype of the AFIT Virtual Emergency Room: A Distributed VirtualEnvironment for Emergency Medical Simulation

摘要

Due to the increasing complexity of emergency medical care, medical staffsrequire increasingly sophisticated training systems. Virtual environments offer a low cost means to achieve a widely usable yet sophisticated training capability. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has sponsored the Virtual Emergency Room (VER) project to develop a simulation system that enables emergency department personnel within level I and II emergency rooms to practice emergency medical procedures and protocols. The VER is a simulation facility that uses a distributed virtual environment architecture to enable real-time, multi-participant simulations. The potential advantages of this system include the ability to evaluate and refine treatment skills, and the ability to provide scenario-specific training for mobile military field hospital teams. These advantages will ultimately improve the readiness of emergency department staffs for a wide variety of trauma situations. This thesis represents the initial phase of a several-year research effort.