An MR Solution to Empathy Training in Medical Students. Collaboration with Megan Hale, Rui Dun Li, Xinran Lin, Emma Paul-Ebai and supervised by Thrishantha Nanayakkara.

brief

Our task was to employ futures thinking to understand the trends in the medical education sphere, identify the gaps and create a solution for our envisioned future scenario.

Medical education needs clinical training. However, there are limitations in using real patients to teach a large cohort of medical students. As the future moves towards hybrid medical education and practice with increasing remoteness, sensory channels that doctors typically rely on are removed. This is why empathy training needs to take a new form.

outcomes

Osprey is a mixed reality platform that allows students to remotely roleplay the diagnostic experience. Using MR glasses, a LIDAR and charging module, and sensory patches, it accurately delivers both the doctor and patient experiences. Osprey improves upon current empathy training practices in a more immersive and realistic manner, provides a metric-driven solution that can measurably improve the empathy of the user and integrates seamlessly into curricula with varying degrees of remote teaching.

click for more details