The conference brought together experts in augmented reality, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. The award for research that uses augmented reality devices to train doctors and paramedics in critical scenarios.
A new approach that uses an augmented reality viewer to recreate critical scenarios, such as a road accident, and that can be used to train medical and paramedical personnel.
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This is the work of the “Augmented Reality” team of CrossLab/Forelab, the laboratories of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa dedicated to the digital transition of companies, and which was awarded as the best demonstration in the recent conference IEEE International Conference on Metrology for eXtended Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Engineering - IEEE MetroXRAINE 2023 , an international event that every year brings together experts in Augmented Reality, Brain-Computer Interface and Artificial Intelligence.
The work of the team, led by Vincenzo Ferrari, professor of bioengineering, was presented at the conference by Alessio Nocera, a PhD student in Smart Industry at the Department of Information Engineering, who showed how with the simple use of a commercial visor it is possible to recreate scenarios useful for rather complex training activities, which usually require a lot of time and resources.
“Simulations to train medical and paramedical personnel - comments Vincenzo Ferrari - are usually conducted by reconstructing a scenario in detail, for example an accident with a car on fire, which has a certain level of complexity and significant costs, and for this reason there are few opportunities to train on emergency scenarios. With our application it is possible to build different critical scenarios in augmented reality. The user lives an immersive experience, is able to interact with real and virtual objects while always through the visor is guided in the different actions to be performed”.
The activities tested were the construction of a scenario of an operating room for the operation of a cardiovascular aneurysm and a road accident involving a vehicle.
"In the operating room scenario - explains Alessio Nocera - you are asked to position what is necessary for the operation, while in the context of a road accident, the person wearing the visor looks at the scene and must be able to analyze it, with the support of the information that appears in the field of vision, therefore noting the risks (smoking car, person in the passenger compartment), evaluating which vehicle is most damaged, where the injured are positioned and how they could be extracted from the passenger compartment. In the case of an accident, we have seen that the best option is to create a mixed scenario, in which virtual objects mix with real objects, so that in the training activity it is also possible to program physical interventions on real objects".
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"The research continues - concludes Nocera - with the implementation of augmented reality applications to guide precision medical tasks, such as surgical ones where an alignment between the virtual guide and the real patient with sub-millimetric accuracy is necessary".
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