Immersive Digital-Twin Simulation-Driven Nursing Education

This paper describes a new class of simulation experiences enabled by the integration of immersive virtual reality (VR) simulation and digital twin (DT), and its potential for transforming current nursing education and on-the-job training. The new approach allows nurturing of holistic knowledge in patient care. The paucity of research, methods, and tools for computer-based simulation-based training specifically aimed at improving experiential knowledge of nurses as a team has motivated this work. We pursue a new simulation modality that closes the loop with a care-provider team, patients, and their dynamic health conditions, all within a high-fidelity care environment. The proposed simulation approach, which leverages digital twins (DTs), interactive immersive VR simulation, and multiple-device network communication, allows a group of nurses to experience, in a virtual-world platform, high-fidelity care situations involving a wide variety of patient profiles and their dynamic pathophysiology, as well as environmental/institutional constraints. The new simulation approach built and tested here will serve as the first reference of clinical "experiential learning", which allows future users in virtual world to directly navigate through and learn from the high-fidelity instances of nursing practice in diverse DT instances.