The project EPICSAVE integrated the aspects of didactics, medicine, Virtual Reality, and Serious Gaming into a novel training medium that can improve emergency medical training in a sustainable and team-oriented manner.
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A rare critical medical emergency may be, for example, an anaphylactic shock in a child. This situation is unlikely to occur during the 3-year emergency paramedic training, meaning that the fully responsible emergency paramedics might only be confronted with such a critical incident later on in their daily professional work. This is why the interdisciplinary team in the project EPICSAVE developed suitable training methods in virtual emergency scenarios.
The goal of EPICSAVE (Enhanced ParamedIC vocational training with Serious games And Virtual Environments) was to supplement traditional training with highly realistic, in-depth Virtual Reality scenarios in a multi-user approach. The focus of the project was on anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction, where there is a high risk of incorrect behavior. The acceptance and efficiency of the approach were investigated with the help of apprentices from two paramedic academies.
“EPICSAVE Emergency Training” is also an award winner in the innovation competition “Selected Landmarks in the Land of Ideas”. Fraunhofer IESE was responsible for the medical didactic concept, the medical contents, and the evaluation of the project. “Germany – Land of Ideas” is the joint initiative of the German Federal Government and German industry, represented by the BDI (Federation of German Industries).
Training in a Virtual Reality environment
The Virtual Reality environment used in the project allows the trainee emergency paramedics to learn without risk and to reflect on situations to which they are only very rarely exposed in everyday work and which could not be represented with sufficient realism using the previous training methods. The project manager at Fraunhofer IESE and initiator of the project, Dr. Thomas Luiz, is familiar with the numerous challenges in emergency missions from his many years of working as an emergency physician and an emergency medical services instructor.
Optimization of treatment and minimization of risks in emergency medicine
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE