Colaboração em sistemas de realidade virtual voltados ao treinamento médico: um módulo para o Framework CyberMed

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) and systems that use its techniques have a recent story from the point of view of their social and practical application. The main idea related to VR refers to the use of three-dimensional environments in which users can explore and interact in virtual worlds and feel immersed and involved. Currently, works that use VR to teaching or conduct trainings are commonly found in literature. In medicine, VR have been used for realistic applications for training of critical procedures. Collaborative VR environments for medical training can allow students to share knowledge or to be assisted by a tutor during a simulation. The objective of this work is to present the process of developing a module for interactive collaboration for the CyberMed, a framework developed since 2004 to help building medical simulations with VR technologies. This module enables collaboration in medical applications with interaction among multiple users. The development of the module consisted on analyzing and defining a protocol for exchanging messages over network, and implementation of some forms of cooperation relevant to medical simulations. The results were a set of classes to support different devices provided by the framework, allowing collaboration by mouse, haptic and tracking devices. Applications were built to validate the module implemented and its integration with CyberMed. In particular, a simulation of the bone marrow harvest procedure was adapted to provide collaboration with touch and force feedback (haptic) among remote users. The integration of this new module enables the creation of collaborative medical simulations with CyberMed that can be used by professionals and students in the training of medical procedures.