Disassociation of Visual-proprioception Feedback to Enhance Endotracheal Intubation

Abstract

This paper discusses the key elements of a research study that focused on training an important procedure called “Endotracheal intubation” to novice students. Such a procedure is a virtual part of treating patients who are infected with the covid-19 virus. A virtual reality environment was created to facilitate the training of novice nurses (or nurse trainees) using the HTC Vive platform. The primary interaction with the virtual objects inside this simulation-based training environment was using the hand controller. However, the small mouth of the virtual patient and the necessity of utilizing both hands to pick up the laryngoscope and endotracheal tube at the same time (during training), led to collisions involving the hand controllers and hampered the immersive experience of the participants. A multi-sensory conflict notion-based approach was proposed to address this problem. We used “Haptic retargeting” method to solve this issue. And we compared the result of the haptic retargeting method with reference condtion. Initial Results (through a questionnaire) suggest that this Haptic retargeting approach increases the participants’ sense of presence in the virtual environment.