Using Virtual Reality in Biomedical Engineering Education

Abstract

This study explored virtual reality (VR) as an educational tool to offer immersive and experiential learning environments to biomedical engineering (BME) students. Traditional and VR videos were created and used to teach required communication skills to BME students’ while working with clinical partners in healthcare settings. The videos of interdisciplinary teams (engineering and nursing students) tackling medical device-related problems, similar to those commonly observed in healthcare settings, were shown to BME students. Student surveys indicated that, through VR videos, they felt more immersed in real-world clinical scenarios while learning about the clinical problems, each team-member’s areas of expertise, their roles and responsibilities, and how an interdisciplinary team operated collectively to solve a problem in the presented settings. Students with a prior in-person immersion experience, in the presented settings, reported VR videos to serve as a possible alternative to in-person immersion and a useful tool for their preparedness for real-world clinical immersion. We concluded that VR holds promise as an educational tool to offer simulated clinical scenarios that are effective in training BME students for inter-professional collaborations.

Educating Outpatients for Bowel Preparation Before Colonoscopy Using Conventional Methods vs Virtual Reality Videos Plus Conventional Methods

“…Second, it is believed that VR videos can make patients focus on the announcements, avoiding distraction from the surroundings, which can further improve the effectiveness of patient education. 31 …”

Virtual reality as a didactic resource from the perspective of engineering teachers

“…VR technologies have proven to be an efficient didactic resource for the teaching of engineering [7,35,43,44,48,64]. Numerous works support the efficacy and effectiveness of VR as a didactic resource in very different fields of engineering: mechanical engineering [28,31], chemistry [24], electricity and electronics [6,31,52,76], civil engineering [49], biomedical engineering [51], materials engineering [66,68,69], or manufacturing [28].…”

Effects of Prestretch on Neonatal Peripheral Nerve: An In Vitro Study

“…In conclusion, the current study is the first to report the failure responses of neonatal BP and tibial nerves when subjected to varying magnitudes and durations of prestretch. The reported data provide novel insights into nerve injury thresholds that can be incorporated in existing teaching and future [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] finite element and computational models of neonatal peripheral nerve injury. Future studies investigating the effects of prestretch magnitude and duration on functional outcomes using an in vivo model will provide further insight 49 into stretchrelated peripheral nerve injury mechanisms and extend the translational scope of the current findings.…”