Deakin medical students first to benefit from automated debriefing system

New computational technology developed by Deakin University will act like a second pair of eyes for medical trainers assessing their students’ performance when participating in simulation-based medical training.

The technology, which was developed by researchers at Deakin’s Centre for Intelligent Systems Research (CISR), will first be used by the university’s School of Medicine this year, and has the potential to transform how current medical students and future doctors and nurses are trained across the country.

CISR researcher Dr Samer Hanoun said the new tool, a computer application that utilises sensory information provided by a mannequin simulating a patient, enables automatic evaluation of trainee performance.

The tool supports automatic extraction and encoding of clinical knowledge for medical training scenarios tailored to the trainee’s level.

“In a normal training setting, trainers are required to assess trainees by timing and counting responses, but at the same time they also need to measure and assess things like behaviour – how well under pressure the trainee performs and their interaction with the patient,” Dr Hanoun said.

“Our new tool allows the trainer to focus on assessing non-technical skills such as team communication, leadership, allocation of tasks, situational awareness and decision making, while the tool monitors the procedure followed.”

“This will ultimately mean better trained medical professionals, so that’s a positive for the entire community.”

“It also means the trainee gets instant feedback, as once the session is finished a report is printed out, enabling the trainees to immediately see how they performed in terms of the practical requirements.”

“And then we can evenly compare into the future, giving the trainee the same task again and monitoring how or if their performance changes according to the data.”

The tool was developed as part of a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project, awarded to CISR Director Professor Saeid Nahavandi as Lead Chief Investigator, in collaboration with industry partner Ytek.

School of Medicine lecturer Ms Kellie Britt said the technology would potentially be used by the School of Nursing and had capacity for future use in hospitals, emergency services and even the military as a means for continued training for all health and medical professionals and providers of emergency lifesaving skills.

“We think this new tool will greatly enhance the way we can train and assess all our medical students. Alongside our own observations, the tool allows us to provide instant and detailed feedback to the students on their performance,” Ms Britt said.

“The current practice is time consuming and requires two facilitators be available for the training - one to observe the technical skills and the second to observe the non-technical skills.”