Caregivers experience the importance of movement through the use of mixed/augmented reality

It turned out to be a well-known phenomenon in health care: patients are relieved of a lot of things, so they hardly need to move at all. And yet movement actually promotes recovery and reduces the risk of medical complications. Reason enough to bring movement-oriented care more to the attention of nurses at the UMCU. Project leader Karin Valkenet is partly responsible for translating this idea into a mixed reality game environment: Hololearn. With this interactive, scenario-based e-learning environment, nurses can practise optimising the movement of virtual patients.

After putting on the MR Hololens goggles with the Hololearn software, the nursing duo walks into a random hospital room, where a virtual patient is lying on the bed and perhaps a virtual family member and/or care provider is walking around. Then, based on the electronic health record, the challenge is to achieve the best possible exercise and energy score for the patient. In doing so, you are constantly weighing up: what do you take out of the patient's hands and what do you let the patient do himself (and how do you achieve this). A total of 7 scenarios have been developed with the aim of allowing nurses to experience how movement-oriented care can be integrated into their daily activities, even when the issues of the day are pressing upon them.

More information: watch a nice promo film of Hololearn here

You see a virtual patient asking: "Would you get me a glass of water?" The challenge for you as a care provider is how to deal with this: do you fetch the glass of water or do you ask the patient to do it himself, while he then starts to act difficult.

Karin Valkenet has worked as a physiotherapist in the UMCU for 10 years and for the past 5 years has been working as a project leader/researcher within the chair of Physiotherapy Science. Within this chair she does all kinds of innovation projects concerning movement in the hospital. In 2018, she won the Ureka Mega Challenge (an innovation challenge organised by the UMCU) with an idea to use mixed reality movement games to stimulate movement in the hospital.