Augmented Manikins for Medical Educatiton

In medical education, human manikin simulators are a well established method of teaching medical concepts and skills. Unfortunately, the current state of the art manikins allow only for a limited flexibility in programming and running training scenarios. These limitation are based on a fixed number of in-built sensors and actuators that control the manikins behaviour and responses to examination and treatment procedures. Among other missing features is sensitivity to touch during physical examination. Figuratively speaking, manikins are not aware of their own bodies as tangible objects.

In this work, we describe how applying standard techniques from the field of virtual and augmented reality can fill this gap in functionality of manikin simulators at relatively low costs. We describe a prototype system that have been successfully tested in pilot studies, present implementation details and discuss possible application of our technique.

The augmented manikin system was first presented at Medical Simulation Workshop held
in Singapore Medical Training Institute, April 16th, 2008. A young cadet is performing
percussion of Anne Torso manikin, searching for sore spots.
A satellite utility for this project was also created for fast semi-automatic geometry acquisition.
A 2 minute video of quick scanning of the torso module of a SimMan manikin is here (26MB).