Lucio Tommaso De Paolis

A comprehensive review of serious games in health professions

Education of healthcare professionals is of primary importance for patient safety. In some health related professions, education and training have to be practiced during the entire working period and not only limited to school years. The use of new technology such as virtual reality and e-learning brings new possibilities with significant improvement in learning outcomes. Serious gaming describes a technology that can educate and train while entertaining users. This type of training can be very useful for health professions because it improves learning outcomes creating a learner oriented approach and providing a stealth mode of teaching. In some fields it represents an ideal instrument for continuous health professions education also in terms of costs because it is cheaper than traditional training methods that use cadavers or mannequins. In this paper we make a scoping review of serious games developed for health professions and health related fields in order to understand if they are useful tools for health related fields training. Many papers confirmed that serious gaming is a useful technology that improves learning and skills development for health professionals.

Haptic, Virtual Interaction and Motor Imagery: Entertainment Tools and Psychophysiological Testing

In this work, the perception of affordances was analysed in terms of cognitive neuroscience during an interactive experience in a virtual reality environment. In particular, we chose a virtual reality scenario based on the Leap Motion controller: this sensor device captures the movements of the user’s hand and fingers, which are reproduced on a computer screen by the proper software applications. For our experiment, we employed a sample of 10 subjects matched by age and sex and chosen among university students. The subjects took part in motor imagery training and immersive affordance condition (a virtual training with Leap Motion and a haptic training with real objects). After each training sessions the subject performed a recognition task, in order to investigate event-related potential (ERP) components. The results revealed significant differences in the attentional components during the Leap Motion training. During Leap Motion session, latencies increased in the occipital lobes, which are entrusted to visual sensory; in contrast, latencies decreased in the frontal lobe, where the brain is mainly activated for attention and action planning.

Augmented Reality in Minimally Invasive Surgery

In the last 15 years Minimally Invasive Surgery, with techniques such as laparoscopy or endoscopy, has become very important and research in this field is increasing since these techniques provide the surgeons with less invasive means of reaching the patient’s internal anatomy and allow for entire procedures to be performed with only minimal trauma to the patient. The advantages of the use of this surgical method are evident for patients because the possible trauma is reduced, postoperative recovery is generally faster and there is less scarring. Despite the improvement in outcomes, indirect access to the operation area causes restricted vision, difficulty in hand-eye coordination, limited mobility handling instruments, two-dimensional imagery with a lack of detailed information and a limited visual field during the whole operation. The use of the emerging Augmented Reality technology shows the way forward by bringing the advantages of direct visualization (which you have in open surgery) back to minimally invasive surgery and increasing the physician’s view of his surroundings with information gathered from patient medical images. Augmented Reality can avoid some drawbacks of Minimally Invasive Surgery and can provide opportunities for new medical treatments. After two decades of research into medical Augmented Reality, this technology is now advanced enough to meet the basic requirements for a large number of medical applications and it is feasible that medical AR applications will be accepted by physicians in order to evaluate their use and integration into the clinical workflow. Before seeing the systematic use of these technologies as support for minimally invasive surgery some improvements are still necessary in order to fully satisfy the requirements of operating physicians.

An augmented reality application for the radio frequency ablation of the liver tumors

Hepatic cancer is one of the most common solid cancers in the world. As surgery of hepatic cancer is seldom applicable, different solutions have been found to cure this disease. One of these is Liver Radiofrequency Ablation. This technique consists in a needle insertion inside the liver parenchyma in order to reach the tumor and in an injection of a radiofrequency current to cause tumor cell necrosis for hyperthermia. The needle placement task is really difficult because surgeon uses ultrasound, CT or MRI two-dimensional image to guide the needle. In this paper we present an Augmented Reality system to help the surgeon to place the needle as best as possible; the application can also help the surgeon during the preoperative planning because it offers various visualization modality of 3D models of the patients organs obtained from the medical images.

Serious Game for Laparoscopic Suturing Training

Serious games usually refer to games that are used for training, advertising, simulation, or education and that provide a high fidelity simulation of particular environments and situations. Serious games are starting to be also employed in surgery-based training applications. This paper presents a serious game for training on suturing in laparoscopic surgery. In particular, it is focused on the physical modeling of the virtual environment and on the definition of a set of parameters used to assess the level of skills developed by the trainees. A pair of hap tic devices has been utilized in order to simulate the manipulation of the surgical instruments.

Cloud Computing and Augmented Reality for Cultural Heritage

In this paper the use of augmented reality and cloud computing technology to enrich the scenes of sites with a relevant cultural interest is proposed. The main goal is to develop a mobile application to improve the users cultural experience during the sightseeing of a city of art through the integration of digital contents related to specific sites or historic monuments. The mobile application has been developed exploiting the Wikitude SDK software library. The huge amount of cultural digital contents mainly represented by images justifies the exploitation of a cloud-computing environment to obtain a multi-platform solution. In particular, we have chosen the KVM and OpenNebula as cloud platform technologies to build a private cloud environment, since they exhibit great features like openness, accessibility, simplicity and scalability. The work has been validated through test beds realized both in laboratory, using images captured from PC display, and in a real environment.

Experiencing a town of the Middle Ages: An application for the edutainment in cultural heritage

The MediaEvo Project aims to develop a multichannel and multi-sensory platform for edutainment in cultural heritage for the realization of a digital didactic game oriented towards the knowledge of medieval history and society by means of the integration of human sciences and new data processing technologies. During the project it has been possible to test the possible interactions between historical research, morphological inquiries, data management systems and the definition of a virtual immersive platform for playing and educating. The platform has also proved to be a means for validating hypotheses and findings formulated by researchers. This paper introduces the theoretical questions related to the educative use of Virtual Reality technology and describes the steps of the reconstruction of the town of Otranto in the Middle Ages: data collection and integration, organization of work, peripherals and software applications.

Walking in a virtual town to understand and learning about the life in the middle ages

Edutainment refers to any form of entertainment aimed at an educational role; it enhances the learning environment and makes it much more engaging and fun-filled. The videogame is one of the most exciting and immediate tools of the edutainment applications since the game enables a type of multisensory and immersive relationship of the user through its interactive interface; Virtual Reality technology makes possible to create applications for edutainment purposes and to integrate different learning approaches. One of the important applications of edutainment is the reconstruction of 3D environments aimed at the study of cultural heritage. This paper presents some results of the MediaEvo Project that has led the researchers to use the reconstruction of a town in the Middle Ages in order to develop a multi-channel and multi-sensory platform for the edutainment in Cultural Heritage. MediaEvo project has permitted a didactic experimentation whereby simulation is considered as a precious teaching support tool. The educational MediaEvo game has prompted students to participate in and experience in a simulated and immersive environment of a town in the Middle Ages in order to connect the recreational actions, and to critically discover roles, functions and actions referring to Medieval life.

MediaEvo project: A serious game for the edutainment

Until recently, the “historic vision” was limited to only a few professionals, scholars and researchers, who share the interpretation codes for extracting the ancient landscape from the actual one. Using this knowledge to reconstruct a virtual interactive town increases dramatically the possibilities of information exchange and diffusion. On this way, the MediaEvo Project aims to develop a multi-channel and multi-sensory platform for edutainment in cultural heritage for the realization of a digital didactic game oriented towards the knowledge of medieval history and society by means of the integration of human sciences and new data processing technologies. It deals with historical findings, geomorphological inquiries, data management systems and the definition of a virtual immersive platform for playing and educating. This paper introduces the theoretical questions related to the educative use of Virtual Reality technology and describes the steps of the reconstruction of the town of Otranto in the Middle Ages: data collection and integration, organization of work, peripherals and software applications. The platform is intended to be useful for educational purposes, for touristic information, for gaming and also for testing the hypothesis coming from researchers about the ancient town and its everyday life.

Otranto in the Middle Ages: a Serious Game for the Edutainment

The MediaEvo Project aims to develop a multi- channel and multi-sensory platform for edutainment in cultural heritage for the realization of a digital didactic game oriented towards the knowledge of medieval history and society by means of the integration of human sciences and new data processing technologies. During the project it has been possible to test the possible interactions between historical research, morphological inquiries, data management systems and the definition of a virtual immersive platform for playing and educating. The platform has also proved to be a means for validating hypotheses and findings formulated by researchers. This paper introduces the theoretical questions related to the educative use of Virtual Reality technology and describes the steps of the reconstruction of the town of Otranto in the Middle Ages: data collection and integration, new historical acquisitions, organization of work, peripherals and software applications.