A Natural and Immersive Virtual Interface for the Surgical Safety Checklist Training

Serious games have been widely exploited in medicine training and rehabilitations. Although many medical simulators exist with the aim to train personal skills of medical operators, only few of them take into account cooperation between team members. After the introduction of the Surgical Safety Checklist by the World Health Organization (WHO), that has to be carried out by surgical team members, several studies have proved that the adoption of this procedure can remarkably reduce the risk of surgical crisis. In this paper we introduce a natural interface featuring an interactive virtual environment that aims to train medical professionals in following security procedures proposed by the WHO adopting a ‘serious game’ approach. The system presents a realistic and immersive 3D interface and allows multiple users to interact using vocal input and hand gestures. Natural interactions between users and the simulator are obtained exploiting the Microsoft KinectTM sensor. The game can be seen as a role play game in which every trainee has to perform the correct steps of the checklist accordingly to his/her professional role in the medical team.