The Digital Futures Lab is one of the first Immersive Technologies research spaces embedded within the NHS. Placed at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, it is supported by Health Education England to help inform national insights for R&D in immersive technologies. As part of our outputs, we have developed several interventions to meet the requirements of Torbay hospital’s key priority domains- healthcare workers, medical students, and patients.
Our aim is to deliver interventions that can be integrated seamlessly into various education and training programmes throughout the organisation. Ideally, immersive interventions should be usable and effective to ensure their long-term acceptability and implications on learning outcomes. This can be determined through investigation of the efficiencies and effectiveness of the interventions.
We are sensitive towards the humanities or ‘humanistic skills’ theme of our focus, and much of our research interest lies in the human factors and non-technical affordances that immersive technologies has.
At Digital Futures we have a small but highly productive team, each person has a different set of skills, which helps us through all our projects.
Extended Reality (XR) Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) are used across various healthcare pathways for staff/student education and training, and for improving patient experiences. As XR HMDs become affordable, accessible and their acceptance increases, it is critical to document the techniques used for evaluating the technology, processes of user engagement and immersion, and outcomes.
The reason for this application experience is to try and reduce the anxiety that adolescents feel when coming into the hospital, going into the unknown
Exploring the use of XR technology to bridge the realism gap inherent within simulations that focus on community care environments.
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