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Justin Fellows, Shane Purdy, Alejandro Ojeda-Celis, Gabriel Majors, Isaac Valdez

The VR Palliative Care Simulation consists of three layers, including the Managers layer, the Game Objects layer, and the Data Objects layer. The Manager layer controls how the game operates. The Game Objects layer displays the types of game objects used in the game. Lastly, the Data Objects layer shows how the data will be collected and stored. Meanwhile each layer interacts with each other by sending messages/using each other to run the game.

Manager Layer - It oversees the systems that initiate and execute the game’s real-time logic and its primary function is to segregate various functionalities into their distinct roles.

Game Object Layer – It defines the interactions of game objects within the virtual world, both with other objects and with various systems.

Data Object Layer – It functions as a mediator, facilitating the communication between the application and the database to manage various data objects and entities.

Conclusions and Future Work

The team resolved several implementation errors by implementing bug fixes and improvements, found a list of implementations and bugs that need to be added or fixed by future teams through running a round of user testing on Scenarios 1 and 2 along with the Tutorial over the course of a week with various Nursing School students and faculty as the testers, and began work on Scenario 4 of the simulation. The following are some future plans for the project:

Resolve/Detect Bugs- Resolving the current list of bugs and detecting more bugs currently undetected in the simulation.

Complete Scenarios 3 and 4 – The future teams should complete Scenarios 3 and 4, implementing user interaction in Scenario 3 and finishing the foundation of Scenario 4.

User Testing on Scenarios 3 and 4 – Run user testing on Scenarios 3 and 4 of the simulation once they are completed using Nursing School students and faculty.

Patient Diversity - Support a change in race, gender, and financial status. When changing the financial status, the tools and house should change to reflect the patient’s financial status.

Ilana Dubovi and Michal Itzhaki. Playing the role of a nurse in a virtual reality simulation: A safe environment for emotion management. Nurse Educator, 48(1):13–18, 2023.
Lindsey Hendrix. Using virtual reality to bridge gaps in nursing - vital record. https://vitalrecord.tamhsc.edu/using-virtual-reality-to-bridge-gaps-in-nursing/, 2022.
Sook Kyoung Park and Hyuk Joon Kim. Development and evaluation of virtual reality-based simulation content for nursing students regarding emergency triage. Journal of Korean Academy of Fundamentals of Nursing, 30(2):292–301, 2023.
Géraldine Perriguey. Student emotions in virtual reality: The concept of psychopedagogy by design. In Immersive education: Designing for learning, pages 51–69. Springer, 2023.
Luis Iván Mayor Silva, Raquel Caballero de la Calle, Miguel Angel Cuevas-Budhart, José Oliver Martin Martin, José María Blanco Rodriguez, and Mercedes Gómez del Pulgar García Madrid. Development of communication skills through virtual reality on nursing school students: Clinical trial. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 41(1):24–30, 2023.

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References

Implementation Details and Test Plan

Architectural Design

Background

Key Requirements

The Care VR team’s VR Nursing system aims to give the nursing program at the University of Texas at Arlington a new tool usable to teach students about end-of-life care in a way that provides practical experience rather than the traditional classroom environment’s experience. This is vital because nursing students will be better equipped with the skills, expertise, and emotional support needed for hospice care through practical experience than what the typical classroom education would give them. Additionally, this project will enhance the reputation of the University of Texas at Arlington’s nursing program and the experience of the hospice patient by improving the quality of care given by healthcare professionals graduating from UTA. The system will be integrated into the nursing curriculum to supplement traditional simulation and clinical practice. The end-goal is to improve the quality of palliative care from healthcare professionals.

April 2024

Senior Design

The VR Nursing system allows users to interact with their surroundings and optimizes the learning process beyond what traditional computer applications or in-class learning can offer. The goal of this system is to better equip nursing professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to provide exceptional care to patients in palliative care settings.

The requirements for this project include:

Customer Requirements

Main Menu
Tutorial
VR Sickness Warning
Pause Menu
Scenario 1, 2, 3, 4
Results Screen
Dialogue Options
Hygiene
IV Administration
The Glasgow-Coma Scale
Patient Diversity

Packaging Requirements

Product size

Performance Requirements

Frame Rate
Thermal

Safety Requirements

Motion Sickness
Warning to User to Clear Nearby Obstacles
Warning to User to properly secure control stick

Security Requirements
Source control
Maintenance & Support Requirements

Code documentation
Testing and Debugging
Version Control

Other Requirements

C# Programming Language
Priority
VR Headset Independence
Headset Portability

The project runs on Unity and uses OpenXR to enable support for a wide variety of headsets with little modification. The project has been developed with developers testing it on the Meta Quest 2 headset.

Each scene has independent progress tracking with the values of relevant variables stored in a local database. As the player completes tasks, scripts run to inform the progress tracker, which acts as the database manager. Meanwhile the progress tracker will update information in the database and retrieve information from the database as needed.

Progress tracking is designed to allow for both real-time information on task completions as well as end-of-scenario summary of completed tasks.

Applicable scenes	Description
Scenario 1	Implement a reset function so that the morphine returns to its original spawning point when dropped below a certain elevation.
All	Add a back button on feedback panels
Scenarios 1 and 2	Needs to be fixed to use the actual score of the user instead of hardcoded values for some results screen results.
Scenarios 2 and 4	Fix that the door knocker is what open the door, you HAVE to use the door knocker
Tutorial	Tutorial scene instructions should include a way to rewind instruction panels.
Main menu	Main menu makes several sounds and is laggy and needs to be simplified.
Scenario 1	Objects dropped on or near the patient get stuck and cannot be picked up again and need their hitboxes adjusted or need to be reset to their original spawn points.
All	Fix Player walking/teleporting out of bounds and through certain objects like windows.
Scenario 4	Scene 4 is unfinished and needs to be finished.
Scenario 1	The armband has a glitched hitbox and doesn’t often allow the user to check it and needs to have its hitbox adjusted.
All	Levels finish without informing the user, so a final results screen should be implemented after a scenario is completed to tell the user they are finished.
Scenario 3	Users are unable to put on gloves.
Scenario 1	The dialogue in the phone conversation needs to be adjusted to be less confusing.
All	There needs to be an indicator implemented for when the user does something right or wrong.
All	UI for dialogue selection is confusing and needs to be simplified.
All	Not every dialogue choice has multiple options, leading to redundancy in there being a choice at all that needs to be removed.
All	There needs to be a way to quit game.

The following is a list of a few of the important necessary fixes found by our team during and outside of our user testing phase that must be fixed by later teams working on the project. However it does not list all of the fixes that we found during testing.

VR Nursing