Medical Institutions To Test Pulse!! Medical Training Game

Officials from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi have confirmed that three recognized medical institutions have agreed to serve as test sites for Pulse!!, a virtual, clinical-training tool for medical and nursing students. In development since March 2005, Pulse!! (which was recently covered in depth by Serious Games Source) will begin testing in January at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, CT, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. The serious game, which will eventually be marketed towards educational institutions as a PC-based training tool, is being funded by the Office of Naval Research, and is being developed as part of a collaboration between A&M-Corpus Christi and noted 'serious game' developer BreakAway. According to a recent BusinessWeek article concerning the game, Pulse!! is played much like any other popular first-person shooter, with students taking on the role of a health-care provider who must diagnose problems of patents under their care. BreakAway also taped re-enactments of people in the hospital using real-life medical staff and students as actors, and used motion-capture equipment in order to ensure that the gameplay experience and environment were as close to realistic as possible. The Pulse!! project has also drawn the attention of U.S. military officials, who consider the game as a potential way to train medical personnel quickly and effectively in the intensive care of battle wounds, which continuously evolve with weapons systems and front line medical techniques. “The work undertaken by the Pulse!! project’s highly-skilled team puts A&M-Corpus Christi further on the technology map because of the ingenuity exercised in developing top-flight methods for medical training,” commented Dr. Flavius Killebrew, president of A&M-Corpus Christi. “The collaborative efforts on both the project’s creation and testing support our academic and research strengths.”