Assessment of Student Engagement in Virtual Reality Clinical Immersion Environments through Eye Tracking

Full Paper Submission: Biomedical engineers can enhance their capacity for innovation by cultivating critical skills in identifying unmet clinical needs through clinical immersion. However, limited access to medical spaces and growing class sizes hinder their ability to experience in-person immersion. In response, we have developed a virtual reality (VR) clinical immersion platform for students to explore unmet clinical needs. Through analysis of eye gaze behavior, this study aimed to unveil whether engagement can be assessed within the VR clinical environment. Using a VR headset with eye tracking, we assessed participants within three selected environments: an exciting, boring, and clinically immersive operating room. Intentionally designed to elicit responses from boredom to engagement, these videos were used to identify potential physiological features. The results indicated that there are distinct patterns in pupil dilation and eye gaze deviation. The boring video elicited the greatest eye gaze deviation from center variance, signifying heightened disengagement, whereas the exciting conspiracy video demonstrated minimal deviation, indicating sustained attention. In comparison, the clinical immersion video had eye gaze patterns closer to the engagement video, as the data was significantly different from the boring video (p = 0.0004, N = 12). Given these results, the ability to perform eye tracking was assessed through webcams to determine if this feature can be utilized in online courses via laptops. The webcams had a high level of accuracy (0.874 ± 0.027, N = 4), indicating that eye gaze can potentially be used to gauge engagement within VR environments for just-in-time learning interventions.