First Aid by Police Officers
Can you handle the distractions?
Platform
HTC Vive
The Police Academy is the centre for training, knowledge and research for the Dutch National Police. It is a dynamic organisation, offering training and knowledge programs on the highest level, anticipating developments in society and translating these into customized education programs.
The Dutch Police Academy approached VR Lab to develop a first aid training tool for police offers based on the work that VR Lab did for ZOLL’s Virtual Rescue.
Maintaining high quality CPR
In this simulation a police officer student is instructed to take over reanimation from a company first aid assistant. The student has to take the all right actions and make all the right decisions while seeking cooperation with a virtual police officer colleague. And distractions are never far off, but high quality CPR must be maintained.
Teacher interaction
The goal is to maintain high quality CPR while still staying aware of what’s happening around the rescue scene.
The simulation can be controlled by a teacher via a dashboard. The teacher can choose to kick-off certain distractions, the arrival of an ambulance and control the dialogue between the emergency rescue team and the police officer.
The teacher also control the duration of the rescue.
Part of the Dutch police uniform
Hold left mouse button on the 3D model
and drag to rotate.
Challenges
A simulation that had originally been developed for marketing & sales purposes now had to be turned into a first aid training tool for police officers. We started with a story board as a way to guide the discussion between developers and the police academy. This proved itself to be a great instrument for discussing requirements and is useful in catching misalignment between development and customer early.
As training for high quality CPR is key we needed a way to measure CPR performance. A Vive Tracker is used to track the position of the hands while performing CPR. Using this tracker the quality of CPR can be measured rather precisely. Depth and rate of compressions are combined into a score that is shown at the end of the simulation.
We had to introduce various distractions. Due to available time and budget we focused on distractions from the public standing around the rescue scene, primarily driven by audio (shouting etc.). Randomness was introduced by allowing the teacher to control the simulation. In testing it also turned out that this allows the teacher to get a better idea of how students react and where their focus is. Finally the way the simulation is setup with the dashboard controlled by the teacher allows for easy extension of the simulation.
Why VR and VR Lab?
It’s easy to see why Virtual Reality is a great instrument for training tools such as this one. VR allows simulating rescue situations in different ways and it enables adding various elements to these situations that are important for learning to perform high quality CPR while being distracted. Basic CPR can easily be reached without VR. VR simulates the reality of a rescue scene. Knowing how to keep giving quality CPR in something close to real-life is as important as the actual act of performing CPR.
VR Lab had already developed a simulation of a rescue scene in the form of ZOLL’s Virtual Rescue. This was an excellent basis for this training tool. With the ZOLL AED 3 being the virtual AED used in the simulation, ZOLL Medical was happy to cooperate. With Virtual Rescue as a starting point this training tool could be developed in a short period of time with a limited number of iterations.