Technology
campusreview.com.au
A nurse wears the Emotiv headset while undergoing a simulated emergency. Photo: NYU/Sapna Parikh
The next generation
CR: The Holodeck project is a mixed reality
environment that seems part patient
simulation and part nurse monitoring. Tell
us about the project.
The brains behind the Holodeck
project to improve nurse training. WB: The Holodeck is a major research
infrastructure grant from the National
Science Foundation here in the US, and it is
to build a new instrument, an experiential
supercomputer that will both create
experiences but then also allow us to
analyse those experiences.
Winslow Burleson interviewed by Conor Burke Where did the idea come from?
A Currently, we have typically one or two
individuals working around a robotic
manikin and interacting largely with the
interfaces but not creating the interpersonal
connections we want to see in the
training of nurses with patients and family
members, and also not looking at the ability
to connect with peers in the professional
and interprofessional teams that are critical
to appropriate healthcare.
cademics at New York University’s
Rory Meyers College of Nursing are
pushing the boundaries with their
latest innovation in nurse training.
As part of their Star Trek-inspired
Holodeck project, Associate Professor
Winslow Burleson and his team are using
headsets to track nurse responses in
patient simulations.
Through skin conductance, the headsets
can measure cognitive load, attention,
boredom and other states of feeling in any
given situation.
Burleson aims for the technology
to improve nurse performance,
nurse-patient relationships and the
connection between colleagues. The
results could also help educational
scientists design different scenarios in
educational situations, and could one
day have applications in measuring the
mental health of nurses.
Campus Review spoke to Burleson for an
insight into the future of nurse education.
26
You monitor the nurses through a headset
and skin conductance, and it measures
cognitive load, attention, boredom and
other states of feeling. How do these
findings affect or tailor your teaching to
students?
There are several different modalities to
the Holodeck: the visual, the auditory, the
physical or haptic, and then the human
dynamic, which is the area you were asking
about; that is, how we use diverse sensors
of human physiology, cognition and affect
to both acquire those signals but then
create interfaces and feedback The next
generation loops that help individuals learn
how to attend to the needs of the patient
and family members.
That’s what we’re doing with these
signals. We’re able to detect elements of
concentration, fatigue and excitement. The
large-scale goal is to move beyond our
current strategy of measuring competency
in simulation and to start introducing the
capacity to have simulation that trains for
conflict, creativity and leadership. So going
beyond capacity and looking at these new
modalities that we could start to engage
individuals in.
As an example, if you saw a person who was
continually bored in a certain situation, how
would you deal with that?
The instrument will allow educational
scientists and nurse scientists to design
different scenarios. One of the scenarios
that isn’t attended well in simulation is what
happens when the manikin dies or if there’s
a code scenario.
So, looking at the emotional state of
individuals in these kinds of extreme
situations is one way in which we want
to learn how to better prepare individuals
for those scenarios through training and
discussion prior to the event. How do
we introduce the likelihood or possibility
that that will occur? Then how do we
debrief those and ensure the resiliency,
capacity and processing of those events
for individuals both in the training scenario
but then also equip those individuals with
the skill to recognise the effects of those
events in the professional settings and how