Virtual reality mentee-mentor multimodal collaboration for surgical skills training – Show-me

Traditionally, novice medical professionals are trained based on the companionship model consisting of practicing skills on real patients during medical internships mentored by experts. However, for both ethical and patient safety issues, as stated in the conclusion of the Haute Autorité de Santé 2012 report "never the first time on the patient", developing new and innovative simulation-based medical training techniques and programs becomes an actual need and an emergency. To ensure this transition, virtual reality-based trainers can play an important role. However, the development of these technologies is complex and potentially expensive. It is therefore necessary to focus their design and use on the actual training requirements of healthcare professionals.
The aim of the Show-Me project is to design innovative multimodal and collaborative interaction techniques and user interfaces allowing an expert mentor to demonstrate his skills, supervise, and guide a mentee through a shared virtual reality training environment for a better transfer of technical medical skills. The proposed techniques and interfaces, will serve to develop collaborative and multimodal tele-mentoring spaces and tools that better match the current training needs of practitioners
To achieve these objectives, a user-centered design approach will be used with all stakeholders (experts, instructors, trainees) being involved during the whole process. This will be facilitated by collaboration with the local simulation center and hospitals.
To foster this research topic both locally and at a national and an international level, the Show-Me project will be coordinated by an expert in the design of collaborative and medical training systems, who will be surrounded by a team of well-established researchers with various complementary expertise (Interaction design, Collaborative virtual environments, Multimodal interactions, User Studies, Human factors) and an expert clinician and researcher in medical education and his team whom input is of great importance for this topic.
This research will improve our understanding of the mentor-mentee interactions, the medical skills transfer process, and more generally, multimodal communication in virtual environments. The successful completion of this project will foster the development of a new and innovative generation of medical training systems and methods. This is expected to improve the quality of medical students’ education. In the long term, this will also have broader impact on patient safety, healthcare delivery and healthcare costs on a global scale.
In addition to medical training, the results will serve to extract guidelines for the design of multimodal tele-mentoring systems that can be used in other application domains, such as industry.