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Digital Planet: Examining Virtual Patients

Factual: Science & Nature

A nurse practices identifying patient safety issues with a virtual anesthesiologist and virtual surgeon

10/12/2013

Examining Virtual Patients

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, Examining Virtual Patients

How virtual patients help medical students with their bedside manners

How virtual patients help medical students with their bedside manners; Piecing together a dinosaur by 3D printing; DIY digital tools for the fashion world

It has been said amongst medics that a good bedside manner is a vital skill.  But many medical students have not lived enough to acquire those social skills.  Their unease is especially evident when it comes to intimate examinations.  And the medical student’s unease only magnifies the patient’s discomfort.  Might a virtual patient help?  Click hears from Dr Benjamin Lok about how technology, virtual patients and the simulation of intimate examinations can encourage empathy from the students and improve their bedside manners.

3D Printed Dinosaur
What do get when you put together a radiologist, a 3D scanning expert and a palaeontologist?  The answer: a dinosaur skeleton realised from a fossil.  One of the team, Dr Ahi Sema Issever, joins Click to discuss how a call from Museum für Naturkunde, a major natural history museum in Berlin, led to this innovative collaboration and the possibility of re-assembling a dinosaur skeleton whose fossilised remains were damaged during bombing in World War II.
 
Digital World of Fashion
The London College of Fashion is paving the way in weaving technology into traditional ways that clothes are designed, developed, made and worn.  From body scanners that measure your dimensions within 2mm accuracy, to the 'magic mirror' that lets you try clothes on without actually trying them on; to the ‘haptic arm’ allowing art students who are more familiar with traditional drawing and sculpting methods to work on an object in an electronic space.  Rich Preston reports on the digital revolution underway in the world of fashion.


(Caption: A nurse practices identifying patient safety issues with a virtual anesthesiologist and virtual surgeon © Virtual Patients Research Group)

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