Virtual Reality tutoring system for home dialysis patients (peritoneal dialysis)

Peritoneal dialysis (PD) is a certain form of home dialysis. In contrast to conventional dialysis by the use of a machine (hemodialysis) in a dialysis center or clinic, patients can flexibly and independently perform blood cleansing themselves (e.g. at home, in the office, on vacation). For this purpose, a dialysis catheter is surgically inserted into the abdomen in advance. In order to carry out home dialysis, the patient needs to be able to fill a sterile solution hygienically into the abdominal cavity on his or her own and to exchange it. If however the patient is not trained well enough and disregards hygiene requirements, home dialysis can lead to potential painful and life-threatening intricacies such as peritonitis, an inflammation of the peritoneum. Thus, a thorough training of PD patients is indispensable to reduce infection rates and to bring about a greater acceptance of PD. However, the currently established conventional training ties up a lot of resources in the healthcare system including personal information sessions and extensive rehearsal of the many individual steps together with the nursing staff. In cooperation with medical experts, a German start-up has developed a virtual reality (VR) software that supplements the traditional training methods. To become acquainted with the PD procedure, patients are equipped with a VR headset, combining goggles, hand controllers and headphones. The patients are confronted with a virtual PD set, which simulates the feeling of sitting in front of a real PD set, comparable to a flight simulator. The patient is enabled to run through the program as often as necessary to become familiarized with the whole PD procedure. As opposed to just watching a video the patient actively carries out all the necessary steps, experiences his behavior interactively with all senses and learns more efficiently. He is completely in the virtual world, which is called immersion. While practising, users are allowed to make mistakes and are guided via visual, haptic and acoustic feedback. The virtual tutor detects mistakes immediately and corrects them. However, the application does not follow a blue-print solution, because often there is more than just one solution. Instead of memorising a blue-print solution, it offers trainees to find a way to solve a problem unrestrictedly. Through repeated learning sessions, the digital tutoring system identifies strengths and weaknesses of each trainee by the use of artificial intelligence. It adapts learning contents automatically to the respective trainee’s learning behavior and speed and focuses on knowledge gaps. Like that, the software adapts to the dialysis patient, and not the other way around, while removing the need for standard teacher student face to face lessons. Repeated learning supplies more information about skills that are already secured and skills that need improvement. Patients learn from their mistakes in a playful manner without exposing themselves to danger or having to fear painful consequences. By going through a guided step-by-step program they will be enabled to eventually carry out the actual home dialysis autonomously once they have reached a sufficient level of experience. Trainings for all PD solutions available on the market are stored in the system. Languages offered are English and German (more to come, if necessary). The training method is on the market and has been successfully evaluated in clinical trials. Companies from the IT or healthcare sector are sought for license agreements. Also Hospitals or dialysis centres could be partners in the framework of commercial agreements with technical assistance or joint research projects to open up new application fields for the training method in the medical sector and find individual and tailor-made solution for case-specific needs. The German SME is interested to get to know about demands for VR trainings related to the health sector in other European countries.