The surgical education learning process significantly relies on hands-on experience and the development of tactile abilities.
Access to surgical training, however, is limited, and typical teaching techniques may not give the essential experience to
acquire these abilities. Immersive technologies, including VR and AR, offer the potential to improve surgical training by
allowing learners to practice and perfect their abilities in a safe and controlled setting. Haptic feedback may allow students
to experience a realistic simulation of surgical operations by giving them with a feeling of touch, helping them to gain the
essential motor skills and confidence in real-world surgical scenarios.
Project funding:
The European Union programme Erasmus+
Project results:
The project aims to achieve the following objectives:
– Improved learning experience: the multi-modal framework seeks to deliver a more immersive and realistic learning
experience, which may result in better learning outcomes and skill development.
– Hands-on experience: the project aspires to create a safe and realistic setting for surgical trainees to engage in hands-on
surgical procedures, which may be especially useful for trainees who have restricted access to surgical procedures.
– Multi-modal feedback: the framework seeks to deliver multi-modal feedback, allowing trainees to get performance
feedback in visual, aural, and tactile modes.
– Increased skill retention: the project intends to improve surgical skill retention by offering a multi-modal learning
environment that may aid in memory consolidation and retrieval.
As a concrete result, the project aims to create an open-access resource for surgical trainees, educators, and researchers.
To facilitate the application of the multi-modal framework in surgical education, the resource will comprise instructional films,
interactive modules, and other educational resources. In particular, the following concrete results will be delivered:
– Development of compendium on applying immersive learning practices for medical study programmes
– Development of immersive learning scenarios for a selected study programme
– Re-designing the selected study programme by integrating the developed learning scenarios
Period of project implementation: 2023-10-01 - 2025-09-30
Project coordinator: University of Agder
Project partners: University of Siena, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences
