Advanced Life Support Simulation

Advanced life support is a set of life-saving protocols and skills. These skills can be trained in simulations to ensure medical personel is prepared. This prototype helps to improve the educational and user friendliness aspect of the current systems by registering participants actions and automating the scenario flow.

In the current simulations the instructor's roll comes with to many tasks. He needs to watch the participant's actions, adjust the scenario accordingly and makes notes on how the participant performs. By automating the scenario flow and registering participants actions it gives the instructor more time to assess what the participant is doing, dus being able to provide better feedback.

Idea

The idea came from the Health Concept Lab within the HAN University of Applied Sciences. The goal was to build a prototype so instructors are not busy with scenarios and have full attention for the participants. Because these scenarios are automated participants could also practice these simulations by themselfs.

The prototype consisted of three applications. The scenario core that controls the scenario flow. An instructors app to start a scenario and a Vital Sign Monitoring System that showed the patient's health status.

Challenges

The prototype ran on a Raspberry Pi and connection to the instructors app was by using Bluetooth. To achieve this we needed to setup our own connection using Bleno. Bleno only supported Node 8 posing some challenges during development. Because Bleno is a low level API we needed to add our own Bluetooth characteristic which was a challenge.

Automating the scenarios was also a challenge. We decided that a ReactiveX workflow would suit this challenge the best because the scenario is build on events. The different steps in the scenario can subscribe to certain events to listen for user input.