A virtual reality chemotherapy simulation that helps train future medical professionals on what to do when the drug leaks out of blood vessels and threatens a patient’s skin is one of six extended reality projects to receive a first wave of funding under the University of Michigan’s new XR Initiative.
Another includes a nuclear reactor simulation that offers training without the safety concerns of a live reactor
“The university is always asking ‘What’s next?’ and it’s thrilling to see the creative and multidisciplinary projects in health care, engineering, and architecture as part of the XR Initiative,” says James Hilton, U-M vice provost for academic innovation at U-M in Ann Arbor. “These projects are looking at long-standing challenges in new ways and will allow our faculty to use XR to redefine what a hands-on, immersive education looks like for our students and learners beyond campus.”
XR encompasses augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and other variations of computer-generated real and virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions.
The three-year funded initiative calls for the university’s Center for Academic Innovation to seed new projects and experiments that integrate XR into residential and online curricula, and to create innovative public/private partnerships to develop new XR related educational technology.
Financial awards for the first-round projects ranged from $12,000 to $25,000, and each award will be supported through a number of in-kind investments from the XR Initiative and the Center for Academic Innovation.
“The first wave of XR projects are looking at unique challenges in new ways and target a wide range of learners from high-schoolers through graduate students, says James DeVaney, associate vice provost for academic innovation and founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation. “That’s important to the center because to understand and make best use of innovative pedagogies and breakthrough technologies we need to design with diverse learners from the start.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 650,000 people a year in the United States get chemotherapy as an outpatient. It is a high-volume, high-risk clinical intervention that requires interprofessional clinical teams to manage, Michelle Aebersold, clinical professor at the School of Nursing, wrote in her proposal.
Her team’s “Getting Under the Skin” project seeks to develop a 3-D environment to help students interested in becoming nurses, pharmacists, and physicians manage a serious side effect of the therapy.
“In the area of high-risk medications, we have only been able to show our students the devastating effects of when hazardous, yet important, intravenous medications leak outside the vessels and cause skin damage,” she says.
“XR has great potential to provide faculty another educational methodology to use in helping students understand their role in caring for patients, being part of a health care team, learning how to care for patients, and one added advantage over other simulation methods is that immersive VR can help students understand what it is like to be a patient.”
Another virtual reality project would create 3-D models to give students experience operating a nuclear reactor.
Michigan Engineering is home to the No. 1 nuclear engineering program in the country. For several decades up to the early 2000s, the program included training at a physical nuclear reactor. The Ford Nuclear Reactor, originally established as a WWII memorial under the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, permanently shut down in 2003.
It was decommissioned over the next four years, leaving U-M as one of the only programs without a research reactor, both in the Top 5-ranked university programs and the Big 10, says Brendan Kochunas, project manager and assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences.
The extended reality nuclear reactor laboratory simulation would allow some retired courses that used the Ford Nuclear Reactor to be taught again to upper level undergraduates and graduate students.
Students would use VR headsets to virtually walk around the reactor control room and floor, look down at the core, view instrument panels, and interact with the control panel.
“In reality, one does not simply walk up next to an operating nuclear reactor core, but in virtual reality one can,” Kochunas says. “We can also overlay simulation results on the virtualized physical systems allowing students to experience neutron fields or temperature fields visually, where in reality this is not possible. Now we get the opportunity to have the Phoenix rise again — only virtually. I think that’s pretty cool.”
Other projects funded include:
- Cross-platform XR tools for supporting student creativity in immersive audio design,
- Crashing trains and launching rockets: A virtual physics laboratory for the classroom
- Augmented techtronics
- Comparison of student learning of head and neck anatomy and diagnosis of pathology using XR
