Designing a virtual reality system for clinical education and examination

The COVID-19 pandemic clearly showed how much medical and clinical students’ education relied on physical instruction and examination. The work presented here was born by the fact that medical and clinical education had to be suspended during the social distancing phase of the pandemic. This work presents the lessons learned from creating a virtual reality system (VTRACS) for educating and assessing clinical students on a limited budget. Our work showed that clinical education could be done in a virtual space with a minimal virtual reality setup and a low-cost virtual reality headset. • Clinical education requires training to proficiency in different clinical scenarios. • Virtual Reality can provide the needed clinical scenarios in virtual form. • Expensive VR setups are not affordable for widespread use in low-income situations. • Cost savings can be made in hardware, platform, deployment, and data choices. • Realism of the VR space is important but compromises are possible on the VR patient.