Paper: Design and implementation of a virtual world training simulation of ICU first hour handover processes

Just had a journal paper accepted with the Australian Critical Care Journal. This is part of our collaboration with Professor Ian Baldwin at Austin Health in Melbourne, Australia, and the Smart Services CRC. This system simulates nurse to nurse ICU shift handover processes, and is being used at Austin Health as a teaching tool for postgraduate nurses. Eprint of journal paper is here.

Abstract

Nursing training for an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is a resource intensive process. High demands are made on staff, students and physical resources. Interactive, 3D computer simulations, known as virtual worlds, are increasingly being used to supplement training regimes in the health sciences; especially in areas such as complex hospital ward processes. Such worlds have been found to be very useful in maximising the utilisation of training resources. Our aim is to design and develop a novel virtual world application for teaching and training Intensive Care nurses in the approach and method for shift handover, to provide an independent, but rigorous approach to teaching these important skills. In this paper we present a virtual world simulator for students to practice key steps in handing over the 24/7 care requirements of intensive care patients during the commencing first hour of a shift. We describe the modelling process to provide a convincing interactive simulation of the handover steps involved. The virtual world provides a practice tool for students to test their analytical skills with scenarios previously provided by simple physical simulations, and live on the job training. Additional educational benefits include facilitation of remote learning, high flexibility in study hours and the automatic recording of a reviewable log from the session. To the best of our knowledge, we believe this is a novel and original application of virtual worlds to an ICU handover process. The major outcome of the work was a virtual world environment for training nurses in the shift handover process, designed and developed for use by postgraduate nurses in training.

Ross

Video: Smart Services CRC Presentation

The Smart Services CRC have on their website a video of me delivering a six minute presentation on using virtual worlds for process training.

Please pardon my wrinkly shirt. I had just got off the plane two hours before delivering the presentation. :-)

Ross

International Workshop on Smart Services for Smart Worlds (SS4SW)

International Workshop on Smart Services for Smart Worlds (SS4SW)
http://www.ss4sw.org/
Explore new applications, business ideas and research challenges
at the intersection of things and services
Colocated with the UIC-09 Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing
Brisbane,Australia, 7-10 July, 2009

=============================================================================

* IMPORTANT DATES
Feb 15, 2009 Paper submission deadline
Mar 25, 2009 Authors notificaton
Apr 10, 2009 Camera-ready papers due

* AIM & SCOPE
Services are the dominant type of economic activity in industrialized economies. The term Internet of Services relates to the representation and (partial) execution of services - in the
economic sense - in the Internet. Many issues around the mapping between economic services
and services in the IT sense are still unresolved. Additionally, only a small fraction of services
are entirely dematerialized; the vast majority of services ultimately relate to things in the real
world: to the Internet of Things. The Ubiquitous Computing community has already made
considerable advances in closing the information gap between services and things. One well-known example is the use of RFID tags in logistics. Yet this is only the beginning, there still
exists a largely untapped source of innovation at the junction of services and things.

This workshop is about bringing together industry and academia to explore how advances in
ubiquitous computing techniques can help improve existing economic services and create
opportunities for new services. We are also interested in how services can add value to smart
things. This is a forum for industry to learn about recent advances in both services and
Ubicomp and also for researchers to learn about the problems faced by industry that may
spark new research questions and the next wave of Ubicomp applications. We solicit a) technical papers with a proven original scientific contribution and b) systematic, well-founded experience reports and requirements / demands analyses. Core IT papers and papers at the boundary of technology and business or humanities are also invited.

We also welcome contributions that address solely the topic of services, independently of
ubiquitous computing, since we believe this also contributes to cross-fertilization of ideas in
the context of UIC-09. Technical, business and legal aspects of services all have their place
here.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Identification of services in existing systems and business processes
_ Approaches for fostering the creation, use and re-use of services
- Aggregation, brokerage and re-purposing of services
- Personalisation of services to classes of users and individual users
- Channels and technologies for accessing services
- Service lifecycle management
- Legal aspects of service ecosystems
- New business models enabled by smart things
- Doing business better, cheaper, faster, greener with smart things
- Economics and sustainability of using smart things
- Applications of things and services in media and advertisement
- Applications of things and services to delivering healthcare and services to citizens
- Applications of things and services to manufacturing and supply chain management
- Lifecycle management of smart things
- Discovering services through smart things
- Discovering smart things using services
- Machine-process able representations of services stored in smart things
- Linking smart things to their related services
- Representation of real world things in virtual worlds
- Running services inside smart things
- Privacy and security issues with things and services

* SUBMISSION & DISSEMINATION
We invite all researchers to participate by submitting an original paper of up to 6 pages in IEEE
CS style. Please see the workshop website for document templates and for details on the
submission procedure. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two members of the PC.
Accepted papers will be published by the IEEE in a single volume with proceedings from all UIC-
09 workshops. Extended versions of the best papers may be invited for publication in a journal
at a later stage.

* WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Dr. Julien Vayssière (Smart Services CRC, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Dr. Erwin Aitenbichler (TU Darmstadt, Germany)

* PROGRAM COMMITTEE (in alphabetical order)
Dr. Erwin Aitenbichler (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Dr. Alistair Barros (SAP Research Brisbane, Australia)
Dr. Ross Brown (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Prof. Michael Fry (University of Sydney, Australia)
Dr. Tim Mansfield (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
Prof. S. Panchanathan (Arizona State University, USA)
Prof. Michael Rosemann (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
Dr. Rainer Ruggaber (SAP Research Karlsruhe, Germany)
Dr. Sharad Singhal (HP Labs Palo Alto, USA)
Dr. Julien Vayssière (Smart Services CRC, Australia)
A/Prof. Wayne Wobcke (University of New South Wales, Australia)

* LOCAL CHAIR
Dr. Julien Vayssière (Smart Services CRC, Australia)

* WORKSHOP WEBSITE
htp://www.ss4sw.org/

Name droppings

Yep, we have been written up in the news again at Metaverse Online Journal.

Ross