Enhancing Tertiary Healthcare Education through 3D MUVE-Based Simulations - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 351

3D mUVe-Based Healthcare
Simulations: Some International
examples from Second Life

Heart Murmur Simulation

A pioneering virtual world-based simulation in the
area of cardiovascular health is the Second Life
Heart Murmur Sim (n.d., Kemp, 2006), conceived
at the San Jose State University. The main purposes
of this simulation are to enable clinical students
to undergo cardiac auscultation training, to tour a
virtual clinic modeled on a real one, and to hone
and test their ability to identify the sounds of dif-
ferent types of heart murmurs. Clinical students
are presented with a range of patients within a
virtual ward of whose heart beats are audible on
different locations on the chest that mirror real life
stethoscopic listening points. The virtual patients
range in type from those having a normal heart
beat to those exhibiting serious heart conditions
such as ventricular septal defects (VSDs). This
enables a student to practice in making diagnoses
based on hearing heart rhythms under various
health conditions.
This is a conceptually simple yet very effec-
tive simulation that allows students to rehearse
and refine techniques at a time and place of their
choosing, away from the distractions and hazards
involved in real hospital wards. This simulation
also removes the patient factor from the exercise,
as no longer do the students have to examine real
and sometimes very ill patients in hectic wards
in order to gain the full advantage of exposure to
and practice with authentic workplace situations.

Second Life (SL) is a virtual world that has
gained much attention among tertiary educators
as it enables its users to explore, socialize and
participate in individual and group role-play
activities. Second Life is developed by Linden
Lab, which uses a client-side program called
the Second Life Viewer to allow its users, called
“residents,” to interact in a virtual environment
through an avatar. The report entitled The Second
Life Economy - First Quarter 2009 in Detail (Lin-
den Labs, 2009) revealed that in March 2009, the
monthly unique residents with repeat user logins
was 732,526. This figure is 25% more than for
March 2008, and represents a 9% growth from
the Q4 2008 figure recorded in December 2008,
illustrating the burgeoning growth of this virtual
world platform. In 2008, Second Life residents
accumulated a total of approximately 397 million
user hours, an increase in 61% over 2007. In the
last quarter of 2009, Second Life residents logged
over 120 million hours.
Numerous tertiary education institutions across
the globe now rent or own virtual land in Second
Life. Universities and colleges generally use their
virtual spaces to build “campuses” in which to
conduct lectures and tutorials, display artwork,
hold music performances, and host various types
of gatherings (Baker et al., 2009). The following
subsections showcase a range of examples of
healthcare simulations developed by institutions
in the UK, USA, and Australia that are currently
operating within Second Life, and that transcend
the mere modeling or replication of on-campus
activities in the virtual environment. The key
pedagogical features, rationale, and benefits of
the examples presented are outlined in each case.

Virtual Hallucinations

The mental illness of schizophrenia is difficult
for the unaffected to understand, and even more
difficult for those affected to live with. In an
effort to promote better understanding of this
condition and to raise the public's awareness of
its often misunderstood symptoms and their im-
pact on individuals, the University of California,
Davis (UCD) Health System created the Virtual
Hallucinations (n. d.) simulation in Second Life.