Simulators for the learning of childbirth – SAGA

Like most medical training, training of obstetricians and midwives, aims to develop in students a joint theoretical and practical knowledge. But models, videos and teaching materials used in schools and training of obstetricians, do not allow training to all actions, nor the understanding of physical mechanisms accompanying gestures. In situ formation is therefore essential, and allows testing the theory, develop manual dexterity and capacity decisions inherent in such activities. But actual training, if it puts the trainees in the delivery room, may involve risks to the woman and the newborn. For example, the novice is not prompted to use the instruments as forceps because their use requires great skill. It is the same for some gestures of eutocic childbirth.

This raises the recurring question in a medical training site for the practice of risk procedures without risk to the patient, who exhibit the characteristics necessary to develop in students the knowledge and operative transferable to real situations.

Systems simulation training can be an answer to this problem of training, but they have to include a reflection on the issues of training and technical developments for their achievement. In this sense, the SAGA project propose a complete simulator for learning gestures obstetric childbirth, restoring a level of similarity with reality determined based on training objectives. This simulator will couple:
- A numerical simulation enabling the determination of the trajectory of the fetus during the childbirth taking into account the morphology of the woman, the position of the fetus and various disorders related to childbirth, and gestures of the user; the computation of efforts due to the interaction between the fetus and the pelvic muscles; the visualization of the organs deformation induced by the descent of the fetus.
- A physical system on which we can make the forces exerted during delivery by ensuring the sense of touch (fetal head, muscles) and retrieve the user's movements.
- A software educational component that relies on the identification of parameters relevant to real situations, their incorporation into the system, the definition of criteria for monitoring and evaluation of user actions, and developing ways of generating customized training courses to each user.

A unique aspect of this project lies in its consortium that brings together clinicians, people of computer graphics, robotics, Sciences education and professional didactics and a designer of systems and simulators for learning through virtual reality. We thus avoid bias of existing simulators which are, for most, either from TICS laboratories, and have little or no upstream consideration of the own characteristics of training, either from laboratory of educational science and are very basic in terms of physical and functional realism. We also guarantee the final result: a functional prototype demonstration.