Virtual humans in the Virtual Hospital

Abstract

Described in this thesis are the details behind the implementation of virtual hu- mans into NTNU's virtual university hospital in Second Life. These virtual hu- mans played as patients, and it will be discussed how such virtual patients can contribute to the education of medical personnel. The work in this project build upon work done earlier on the virtual hospital by the students Kleven and Heintz. Virtual environments have been explored earlier by other projects as an alterna- tive to traditional patient simulation and paper based education. These projects have been met with positive results, and this thesis was an attempt to implement virtual humans in a virtual hospital for purposes of patient simulation. The eval- uation of the work took place in two stages. Firstly, a testing of the system by nurse students and teachers from Alesund University College. The second stage was the presentation of the system to two experts, a teacher from the Faculty of Nursing (HiST), and a professor at the Department of Public Health and General Practice (NTNU).