Anesth-on-the-Go: Designing Portable Game-based Anesthetic Simulator for Education

Gaining extensive practice in anesthesia procedures is critical for medical students. However, the current high-fidelity simulators for clinical anesthesia practice limit such vital opportunities due to their professional-level functions, large size, and high installation costs. In this paper, we propose Anesth-on-the-Go, a portable game-based anesthesia simulator that allows medical students to repeatedly practice clinical anesthesia procedures anywhere, anytime on a conventional personal computer. The proposed simulator is designed for medical students, and it allows them to manipulate controls appropriately for various anesthesia procedures according to pre-determined surgical scenarios. Based on iterative interviews with clinical anesthesia instructors, we designed a simulation interface with four key components: 1) a monitor, 2) a decision-making board, 3) a surgical field view, and 4) a communication view. As our initial evaluation, we introduced the simulator in the training curriculum for medical students and verified its effect on their proficiency level in subsequent training with high-fidelity simulation. The results show that individual and prior training with our simulator improved each student's overall performance (i.e., score) and stimulated discussion among teammates during the subsequent formal training. The evaluation's findings also indicate that the simulator experience can facilitate post-training reflection.