While in Inverness I visited the Center for Health Science where I witnessed their state-of-the-art medical simulation equipment, including these incredibly sophisticated (and creepy) medical dummies. Doctors and nurses in training use them to train for real-life scenarios, so these life-like dolls have a temperature, a pulse, a voice and can undergo a number of procedures including a tracheotomy. A doctor monitors the virtual intervention, prompting the virtual ‘patients’ to express various symptoms while trainees attempt to treat them. Below, a more compact system for training dentists: the hollow rubber heads are fitted with real teeth which trainees can practice on. It’s fascinating to see how this kind of manual training is achieved entirely through tangible interfaces and that these can have remarkable verisimilitude.
More pictures of these dummies are available here.