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Idaho State Simulates Emergency Response in Second Life
5/1/2008
Imagine entering the virtual world Second Life to discover that a flu pandemic requires you, a health care professional, to attend to stricken patients lying on the streets around an over-capacity virtual hospital. When you report in to collect your virtual uniform, you're told what your responsibilities will be during the disaster and to whom you'll report.Tremendous cost savings, along with the ability to offer more realistic emergency preparedness training to a wider audience of health care professionals and emergency responders, are two of the reasons behind Play2Train, a two-year-old effort at Idaho State University at Pocatello that is using tools like Second Life to enable distance learning for emergency response training.
Play2Train is affiliated with the Idaho Bio-terrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program (IBAPP), a statewide effort to provide bioterrorism and emergency preparedness training to Idaho's healthcare workforce. The Second Life project is one of several approaches IBAPP is exploring "to create training at the point of need," according to. Ramesh Ramloll, a professor at the Idaho State University Institute of Rural Health who has built a virtual world in Second Life specifically to train emergency response professionals in scenarios such as pandemics, bioterrorism attacks, and other large-scale disasters.
Also, a group called the Play2Train Open Content Alliance is an evolving collaborative effort among universities to build a permanent archive of open source virtual worlds, including their content and applications, to support public domain emergency preparedness training and exercises.
Second Life is just one of the technologies Play2Train may use for virtual training on emergency health and response issues, Ramloll said. They are also considering possibilities such as Web conferencing software and intelligent, programmable dummies.
In Second Life, the Play2Train environment for emergency response training is spread over three islands that have been purchased specifically for the project. Access to the islands is limited to health care professionals and emergency responders affiliated with the training. One island is dedicated to a virtual town; another contains a virtual hospital, with a second hospital under construction.
The virtual world enables nursing students, as well as practicing health care professionals, to log in during a training session and practice the skills they've learned in more theoretical courses. During a Second Life Play2Train exercise, teams of players are informed of a disaster scenario, then must work together online in the disaster-struck virtual town. Wearing headphones to communicate with each other, participants attend meetings to prepare their response, as well as working with patients. Realistic effects in the 3D world include stricken patients, other professionals including police and fire fighters, and a streaming newscast about the disaster on a large TV screen in the meeting room. Players can also use emergency equipment such as triage tents, which closely mimic actual facilities.
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