The Design and Evaluation of a Haptic Veterinary Palpation Training Simulator
Andrew Crossan · 2003
Virtual Reality (VR) simulators have the potential to offer a new training paradigm for improving the practical skills of novice doctors and veterinarians. They provide a training environment where novices can make mistakes and learn from these mistakes without consequences to the patient. However, if adoption of VR medical simulators is to become widespread it is essential that they are shown to provide benefit in areas that have previously been difficult or dangerous to train for. They must show benefit over existing methods, and more importantly show that they provide the expected training benefits to the user. This thesis follows through the design and evaluation of a veterinary medical palpation simulator. It is structured around three main areas. Firstly, it examines the integration of a simulator into an existing veterinary medical course and demonstrates the benefits of using accepted computer aided learning design techniques. Secondly, it examines the problem of evaluation of a simulator. A thorough, structured evaluation is performed that examines different aspects of the training environment developed. Finally, methods of augmenting a simulation are discussed. Multimodal cues are introduced as a method of providing guidance and assessing the performance of users on the