Collaborative evaluation of a haptic-based medical virtual environment

Smith, Shamus P.; Todd, Susan

Abstract

There is increasing use of virtual environments for medical training applications. Simulated medical environments allow clinical staff to practise medical procedures without endangering patients. Haptic devices are a key technology in many such systems adding a sense of touch to virtual interactions allowing healthcare practitioners to practise and test their clinical skills in life-like simulators. However, evaluating haptic-based virtual environments can be difficult as gathering user feedback on haptic interaction by traditional methods, such as post-session interviews and questionnaires, can be error-prone if users misremember their experiences. This paper describes the use of cooperative evaluation, a modified think aloud protocol, to evaluate the usability of a commercial haptic-based medical virtual environment called Virtual Veins. An evaluation was performed with 3rd year medical students using cooperative evaluation to evaluate Virtual Veins in a target deployment environment. Although the cooperative evaluation was successful in eliciting a number of usability issues, there were few haptic related verbalisations from participants. In haptic-based systems the evaluator does not share the sensory feedback with the participant. This can be problematic in questioning the participants about their haptic experience and encouraging haptic-specific comments.

Citation

Smith, S. P., & Todd, S. (2007, October). Collaborative evaluation of a haptic-based medical virtual environment. Presented at 4th INTUITION International Conference on Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments, Athens

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 4th INTUITION International Conference on Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments
• Publication Date: Oct 1, 2007
• Deposit Date: Jan 15, 2009
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 8, 2009
• Pages: 102-110
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 4th INTUITION International Conference on Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments, 4-5 October 2007, Athens.
• Keywords: Virtual environments, Haptics, Evaluation, Medical training.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1162074
• Publisher URL: http://www.intuition2007.org/