Diagnostic errors represent a significant source of harm throughout the healthcare profession. Even in dentistry they can lead to wrong or unnecessary therapies, loss of patient’s trust, and even the loss of the teeth of a patient. Therefore, it is important to improve the education of future healthcare professionals by optimizing their cognitive and practical skills by decreasing the time for education. Specially, in dentistry, the practical skills were restricted to unrealistic phantom heads and artificial teeth mimicking patient scenarios for years. As a result, virtual simulators are introduced to help students grow and advance their skills in a representative virtual environment.
Virtual training simulators are used to improve the healthcare education system by implementing virtual patient models into the educational process. It offers students the opportunity to learn in a safe environment. Due to this, the dental educators also have used simulation primarily to provide a safe learning environment for students to learn and practise skills before they treat actual patients. Simulation has also been used to facilitate the transition into the dental clinic and enhance a students’ pre-clinical experience through inclusion of a wide range of simulated patient scenarios.
In this project, a virtual patient can be used to simulate possible treatment options and for planning of multidisciplinary treatment approaches. It can be introduced as an intelligent tutoring system for teaching decision-making skills in clinical dentistry which has a particular focus on teaching situation awareness skills in decision making. This can be identified as an immersive VR simulator for teaching emergency management in dental surgery with a low-cost and readily available VR technology to maximize accessibility to the students while delivering a formative feedback.
- A virtual patient simulator to be used by dental students collaboratively.
- Practising emergency management in dental surgery.
- Improve the awareness skills in decision making.
- Real time guidance through a tutoring module as a feedback system.