By Janice Phelan,
April 18, 2022
Student developers from the ŷƵ are working with the university’s
School of Nursing to provide an immersive learning experience for nursing students. Using state-of-the-art
equipment in the UCM Lee’s Summit Mixed Reality Studio, the students – known as Team Jupiter – are developing simulation guides for an augmented
healthcare world.
The innovative simulation includes a step-by-step virtual assistant to help the nursing
students perform various tasks, allowing them to practice real-life healthcare scenarios.
“It will help nursing students to understand the processes like CPR, blood sugar and
heart assessment,” said Nayan Dixit, Team Jupiter leader. “To begin with, we started
with the CPR process to simulate chest compressions and artificial manual breathing
which is used in cardiac emergency conditions.”
Team Jupiter also includes Divya Chaturvedi, Hardik Bharatkumar Somaiya, Manish Mondal,
Suhas Dhar and Tanmayee Swathi Mongati.
At the Mixed Reality Studio, a part of UCM’s Gigabit Lab, innovators have the opportunity
to use the studio’s leading-edge devices to create, develop and deploy both augmented
and virtual reality experiences.
“The Mixed Reality Studio has been really helpful in terms of providing the devices
like HoloLens and Oculus Quests as well as a lab-like environment for carrying out
the experiments and fostering innovation,” Dixit said.
In addition, the student team has worked with Annie Wallace, UCM School of Nursing
assistant professor.
“Dr. Wallace has been really helpful in providing academic materials, experience flow
guidance as well as valuable feedback on improving the application,” Dixit added.
"I am so impressed with the projects Team Jupiter is working on for the UCM School
of Nursing,” Wallace said. “The scenarios they are building using mixed-reality devices
and simulations are a great way for our nursing students to practice skills in a realistic
and applicable environment. It will help our faculty demonstrate and teach skills,
critical thinking and nursing reasoning. Our students will use these scenarios to
build a deeper perspective and understanding of material we cover in lecture and in
our skills lab. It allows our students the opportunity to practice in the augmented
environment with faculty, or in independent practice time. We are very excited to
continue building new experiences with Team Jupiter. We are working together to build
the future for nursing education at UCM."
The team’s goal is to complete the application by summer. “All in all, it has been
a steep learning experience for us as a team working on this cutting edge futuristic
technologies,” he said.
Team Jupiter is one of several student teams creating real-world virtual and augmented
reality applications for area organizations and businesses through UCM’s Mixed Reality
Studio.