Health Services Virtual Organisation
The Health Services Virtual Organisation (HSVO) project is a research platform for the experimental development of shared Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for health services. This includes support for patient treatment planning as well as team and individual preparedness in the operating room, emergency room, general practice clinics, and patients' bedsides. In the context of the Network-Enabled Platforms, the project offers support to distributed communities of learners and health-care practitioners. My role in this project involved conducting field research studies at the McGill Medical Simulation Centre and translating the needs and behaviors of the tutors, staff and residents into proposed services for a camera array and medical simulation sessions across the Atlantic using a high fidelity mannequin simulator.
A typical scenario using the camera array can be described as follows: a surgeon presents a sophisticated procedure to a group of residents (locally and remotely). While carrying out the procedure, he can move his head freely without worrying about the camera position. If he does occlude a camera, the residents are able to switch to an alternative, obstruction-free view at any time. Using this mechanism, the surgeon can ask the students to observe from his exact viewpoint to indicate what cues they should look for to identify a crucial part during the surgery. To satisfy the requirements of these types of scenarios, our design involves a set of 18 cameras. The system indicates the recommended viewpoint from the perspective of the instructor; however, remote viewers can also select their viewpoint dynamically to obtain their own desired view of the procedure. In addition, an overview of the people interacting in the operating room is displayed.
The image above presents the system deployed at the McGill Medical Simulation Centre, while performing a suturing demonstration. This was a joint effort from the team at the Shared Reality Lab, working under the HSVO project at McGill University. During this project, I had the delight and fortune to meet and work with Jeff Blum, Josh Redel, and all the staff members at the McGill Medical Simulation Centre.
This project was funded by CANARIE (Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network). Lakehead University in Thunder Bay was the lead organization for the HSVO Project. This project was developed in collaboration with: The Northern Ontario School of Medicine, iDeal Consulting, National Research Centre (NRC) - Institute for Information Technology, the Communications Research Centre, McGill University, Innovations in Learning, and Stanford University.
Publication:
Olmos, A., Lachapelle, K., and Cooperstock, J.R. (2010), " Multiple angle viewer for remote medical training ", ACM Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for Distance Learning.
Blum, J.; Sun, H.; Olmos, A.; and Cooperstock, J. R. (2011), "End-User Viewpoint Control of Live Video from a Medical Camera Array", In International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras, August.
More..?
Visit a log of all the "Field studies, design proposals & prototypes" for HSVO. Watch a YouTube video of the demo given at the Orion Summit, or visit the main project page for the project.