Heart attacks in virtual reality

Many heart attack victims don't know they are experiencing a deadly medical condition until it's too late. But a virtual reality game designed by Systems Engineering Professor Barry Silverman may soon teach at-risk patients all the basics -- in 15 minutes. Silverman discussed his program and other medical and military virtual reality simulations in his lecture entitled "Building Virtual Reality Software Agents That Simulate Human Response to Psychophysiologic Stressor Variables: Theory and Case Studies." This lunchtime seminar, held in the Vagelos Research Laboratories yesterday, attracted a crowd of about 30 students and professors from disciplines including Engineering, Nursing and Medicine. The makeup of the crowd reflected the collaborative nature of Silverman's Heart-Sense game -- a project that incorporated the efforts of almost 50 people from multiple disciplines. According to Silverman, this game addresses a very basic but serious problem. "People delay going to the hospital once they have a heart attack... from two to 12 hours. The medicines they have to give you work best within 60 minutes," Silverman said. According to him, this game would be distributed by doctors to high-risk patients -- potentially preventing or reducing the delay period. First, the game teaches the player to identify heart attack symptoms. Then, the player travels to a virtual village, where he or she meets a woman who may be having a heart attack. Finally, the player must determine if the woman is experiencing a heart attack, and if so, convince the woman to call 911. The guide on the tour, Bea, was "graphically designed by Nursing students, and all the intelligence programmed into it by Engineering students," Silverman said. According to game testers, the virtual reality education approach is more logical and easier to use than a paper version. In the next phase of the project, Silverman is considering introducing more characters to address individual variations. Besides the many uses for virtual reality in the medical community, Silverman added that the military is also very interested in applying human behavior modeling to military training, noting that predicting enemy behavior would combine two variables: the type of enemy being encountered and internal and external stress on the enemy. Nursing Professor Norma Lang, a Heart-Sense consultant, attended the seminar to learn more about the many uses of virtual reality. "Virtual reality is a potential way to do a lot more in teaching and research," Lang said.