Cognitive simulators for medical education and training

Simulators for honing procedural skills (such as surgical skills and central venous catheter placement) have proven to be valuable tools for medical educators and students. While such simulations represent an effective paradigm in surgical education, there is an opportunity to add a layer of cogniti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of biomedical informatics 2009-08, Vol.42 (4), p.593-604
Main Authors: Kahol, Kanav, Vankipuram, Mithra, Smith, Marshall L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Clinical Competence
Cognitive Science - instrumentation
Cognitive training
Decision Making
Education, Medical - methods
Educational Measurement
Feedback
Female
General Surgery - education
Humans
Laparoscopy
Male
Medical education and training
Motor Skills - physiology
Multitasking
Patient Simulation
Psychomotor Performance
Reproducibility of Results
Simulation
Task Performance and Analysis
User-Computer Interface
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Summary:Simulators for honing procedural skills (such as surgical skills and central venous catheter placement) have proven to be valuable tools for medical educators and students. While such simulations represent an effective paradigm in surgical education, there is an opportunity to add a layer of cognitive exercises to these basic simulations that can facilitate robust skill learning in residents. This paper describes a controlled methodology, inspired by neuropsychological assessment tasks and embodied cognition, to develop cognitive simulators for laparoscopic surgery. These simulators provide psychomotor skill training and offer the additional challenge of accomplishing cognitive tasks in realistic environments. A generic framework for design, development and evaluation of such simulators is described. The presented framework is generalizable and can be applied to different task domains. It is independent of the types of sensors, simulation environment and feedback mechanisms that the simulators use. A proof of concept of the framework is provided through developing a simulator that includes cognitive variations to a basic psychomotor task. The results of two pilot studies are presented that show the validity of the methodology in providing an effective evaluation and learning environments for surgeons.
ISSN:1532-0464
1532-0480
DOI:10.1016/j.jbi.2009.02.008