Virtual Reality Experiences to Identify Unmet Clinical Needs – Entrepreneurial Track

Current clinical immersion courses require a very limited number of students to be able to enter a hospital or clinical settings and attend Grand Rounds. These classes typically have students reverse engineer medical devices, attend Grand Rounds or surgeries, and interview physicians and hospital staff to identify unmet clinical needs that biomedical engineers could improve upon in the future and develop medical devices in the industry to meet these unmet needs. However, given the increasing class sizes of our institutions, and the availability of hospitals and clinics in other institutions with undergraduate biomedical engineering programs, this has become increasingly difficult and impossible to provide all students with these opportunities.

The goal of this project is to develop virtual reality videos and environments for students to be able to immerse themselves in a hospital or clinical setting remotely. Through virtual reality and video interviews with physicians and hospital staff, these learning modules will provide a large number of students the ability to identify and learn how to evaluate unmet clinical needs for future capstone courses (e.g. our own BioENGINE program that you are enrolled in now!). The students will create videos and immersive environments to show what happens in a clinical and hospital setting, which will be utilized in a future online unmet clinical needs finding course for the BME undergraduate program and the School of Medicine education program. The design and prototype will consist of videos and environments to provide the course with a wide range of different environments in the emergency, in-patient, surgical, out-patient, and standard clinics, such as neurology, cardiology, gynecology, etc.

Project Mentor:

Engineering Mentor: Christine King, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine, kingce@uci.edu, Michelle Khine, PhD, Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Irvine, mkhine@uci.edu

Physician Mentor: Warren Wiechmann, Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine, Fellowship Director of Multimedia, Design, Education, and Technology (MDEdTech), Department of Emergency Medicine, UC Irvine wiechmaw@uci.edu

Other Resources: iMEDED Initiative: http://www.meded.uci.edu/educational-technology/imeded-about.asp

Team: