Fundamental Surgery Brings Users Together

FundamentalVR is expanding its educational platform, Fundamental Surgery, with ‘Teaching Space’. This feature allows multiple users to visit a virtual classroom for interactive lessons and meetings.

Earlier this year, FundamentalVR expanded its multimodal platform with its multiuser capability, which allows unlimited users to practice, learn, and teach together inside an operating room (OR). Teaching Space's addition now lets multiple users meet in a virtual classroom setting, complete with an interactive whiteboard, where they can conduct lessons, discuss a procedure before attempting it in the virtual OR, or debrief after practicing a skillset. With Teaching Space, instructors and their trainees can interact, write notes on the whiteboard, and share ideas, all from different locations and settings. Additionally, users can easily transition between Fundamental Surgery's virtual OR and Teaching Space to make remote learning and practice even more engaging.

For more on virtual training solutions, check out  Remote But Still Together

Additionally, medical device and pharmaceutical companies can save both time and money by bringing surgeons and KOLs together into Teaching Space for briefings, Q&A sessions and one-on-one training without the need to travel. The application also has value for medical sales for training, compliance and virtual sales calls with “digital twins” of instrumentation.

"COVID-19 has presented significant challenges to surgical training and in many cases completely disrupted traditional training programs, which have relied upon face-to-face events," said Peter Rainger, Chief Learning Officer at FundamentalVR. Video conferencing facilities have come to meet the immediate communication needs of many. However, these 2D platforms do not fully replace the teaching and learning opportunities of being together in the same room talking about a patient case pre-operatively or live in an OR looking at the patient anatomy and handling surgical tools. Our new Teaching Space, which provides a collaborative environment for surgical education in VR, allows residents and KOLs from across the globe to come together for teaching sessions, to review cases and share their knowledge and skills. In our new Teaching Space, I can simply pick up a pen and draw out concepts on a whiteboard and allow trainees to annotate and write comments, all in real-time, whilst talking as if we were in the same room. The possibilities for this new flexible teaching space in the future are endless!"

Teaching Space is compatible across both of Fundamental Surgery's accredited modalities: HapticVRTM and @HomeVR. HapticVRTM combines VR with the sense-of-touch to enable true skills acquisition by allowing surgeons to experience the same sights, sounds and feelings they would in a real procedure. The platform utilizes off-the-shelf hardware (PCs/laptops, VR headset, and haptic arms), making it less than a tenth of the cost of current learning practices.