Abstract
Every establishment is vulnerable to imminent threatening situations. Hence, traditional hands-on evacuation training is paramount to assure the establishments’ safety. However, typical evacuation training has limitations in its ability to reproduce threatening situations. In Health Care Establishments (HCE) such as a hospital, traditional practical training may affect the daily operation. Also, usually, only a small number of healthcare workers participate in regular training. Moreover, the inclusion of features that can threaten patients’ safety — such as fire and smoke — is not allowed. Consequently, the healthcare workers’ engagement and retention of knowledge acquired through training are impaired. Thus, Virtual Reality (VR) emerges as an alternative to traditional evacuation training. Therefore, we designed a VR simulator specifically focused on hospital evacuation training in the face of a fire situation. This VR evacuation training has shown the potential to aid healthcare workers to acquire abilities concerning evacuation in the face of fire.
Eduardo G. Q. Palmeira
Doctoral Candidate
My research is focused primarily on human factors in text input techniques for Virtual Reality.