HAPTEX - Using Haptics & Virtual Reality to Improve Objectivity and Validity of Medical Training & Examinations

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Over the next two years the UK has committed to training an extra 1500 medical students, this will bring the total to almost 7500 students per year. It is essential to ensure the competencies of a newly qualified doctor. The concept of 'Black Wednesday' in August refers to the day when a new cohort of junior doctors arrive on the wards. Ensuring the competency of newly qualified doctors improves patient outcomes and reduces harm (improving quality of life).Assessment of competency lacks standardisation across medical schools although projects are starting to address this. The UK medical licensing exam will introduce a common written content examination across medical schools in the next five years. In Parallel to this the general medical council has introduced a list of core clinical competencies for newly qualified doctors. However, there is no standardised national assessment.Numerous additional challenges in assessing clinical skills exist including: ethical (not using patients); mannequin based assessment lacks realism and authenticity; assessment stress is rising resulting in severe mental health implications; objectivity in assessment of clinical skills is hard to standardise with technical failure of equipment and the subjective nature of assessment gives rise to unconscious bias.In recent years rapid development of VR and related technologies have given rise to many new opportunities for medical education. Despite being demonstrably effective since the early 00's, current technologies for medical training are highly specific to a particular clinical skill or discipline. Generic Robotics (GR) have developed a hardware and software simulation platform leveraging VR and Haptics (Touch Feedback) which is the world's first multi-purpose clinical simulator (SimuTouch(r)). A universal platform brings many advantages and changes the way training institutions can invest in and deploy simulation in their curricula.The next frontier for computer simulation is assessment, there is opportunity to address many of the challenges already highlighted but, uniquely, through the SimuTouch(r) platform, there is additionally the opportunity to unify training with assessment bringing even wider efficiency improvements, cost saving and standardization.GR will collaborate closely with expert medical educators at King's College London. This project will begin with a discovery phase using the General Medical Council outcomes for graduates' core medical skills list as the starting point to identify areas for technological exploitation. Approximately 5 skills will be selected for development, split between simpler, VR tasks and more complex Haptic tasks which will then be validated in a mock OSCE.