Virtual Reality Tracheostomy Care - An intuitive training platform for nursing staff
Business Needs
During our research, we learnt that there is a huge impact due to improper Tracheostomy Care in hospitals and home care setup. Some of our key findings were:
- Incorrect care for the tracheostomy tube can lead to increase in infection and mortality rates
- Improper cleaning of inner cannula can lead to an emergency, complete tube change
- Not following care protocol can increase average time to decannulation
01Discover
After extensive secondary research online and speaking with clinical experts, we understood that Tracheostomy Care requires a strict protocol in order to avoid contamination of the critical parts used in Tracheostomy which can lead to infection and mortality. We learnt that the main reasons for the above impact are:
- Insufficient knowledge of cleaning and replacing the inner cannula
- Incorrect use of tracheostomy care protocol
- Sharp fall in the number of trained nurses in hospitals due to pandemic
Persona
We conducted a brief user research to understand the goals and pain points of the key stakeholders. We identified two personas who were the potential users of the applications.
02Define
We needed to find an intuitive, cost-effective solution that will enhance patient outcomes and at the same time boost productivity and effectiveness of the clinical staff.
In our ideation sessions, we came up with the idea of Virtual Reality (VR) which will allow to simulate the hospital environment as close to reality as possible.
03Design
We visualized different aspects of the virtual experience to simulate the real hospital environment, such as the hospital scene, tracheostomy materials and patient model. We created custom 3D models of the tracheostomy materials based on the pictures of the actual materials. The patient model was created as per our requirements with custom animations to mimic real patient behavior in such a procedure.
The whole experience was designed around the two personas (nursing staff and the instructor) where the instructor will be able to join the experience to observe and guide the nursing staff who is undergoing the actual training.
We designed the interactions based closely on the real procedure which included step-by-step guided experience supported by various intuitive user interface elements such as text, buttons, icons, sounds and animations.
04Solution
Virtual Reality Tracheostomy Care is an intuitive training solution where nursing staff & students can learn to follow the tracheostomy care protocol - anywhere and anytime in a virtual simulated environment. The training sessions can be facilitated by experts where multiple nursing staff can join and learn.
Virtual Reality (VR) Tracheostomy Care - An intuitive training platform for nursing staff
VR based training where nursing staff & students can learn to follow the tracheostomy care protocol – anywhere and anytime. The training sessions can be facilitated by experts where multiple nursing staff can join and learn. The solution can be extended by adding further scenarios to continuously enable nursing staff in tracheostomy care procedures.
Virtual Reality (VR) Tracheostomy Care - Onboarding experience for beginners
Onboarding experience to enable new and novice users to get comfortable with the VR controllers and environment before they start the training sessions.
Features
- Multi-user collaboration: doctor & nurse
- Custom avatars: multiple avatars for selection
- Multiple sessions: create & join sessions
- Smart guidance: Instant feedback for correctness
- In-app assessment: Integrated learning assessment
- Intuitiveness: Onboarding experience for beginners
- Multi-media support: text, audio, video & animations
Potential Benefits
- Enhances the knowledge of tracheostomy care protocol among nursing staff & students
- Ability to practice repeatedly to gain confidence in tracheostomy care
- Helps reduce infection and mortality rates
- Helps decrease the average time to decannulation
- Reduces training cost with scalable, self-service model