News Release

CONTACT:       Hope LaFreniere, hope.lafreniere@ttuhsc.edu

                          (806) 743-1466

The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) F. Marie Hall SimLife Center has been named one of two medical simulation centers that will participate in a pilot study with San Diego State University using holographic technology created by Pearson – the world’s learning company.

“This project is consistent with TTUHSC’s aim to be a thought leader and innovator,” Associate Dean for Simulation Sharon Decker, Ph.D., R.N., said. “This unprecedented collaboration between higher education and industry will solve real problems in medical education. The goal of this initiative is to bring simulation capabilities to a larger number of institutions, improving the quality of education and healthcare as a whole.”

The mixed reality pilot will involve students in the F. Marie Hall SimLife Center and incorporate Microsoft HoloLens, the world’s first untethered, head-mounted computer. The content will be created using Microsoft’s holographic video capture capability to process video of people with various health concerns into holograms for students to experience in a clinical setting.

“Many health care programs would love to have standardized patients as part of their curriculum,” Pearson Immersive Learning Solutions Director of Strategy Peter Campbell said. “Finding, hiring, training and maintaining a highly-skilled and diverse set of standardized patients is incredibly expensive and complex. Our solution is to build a set of standardized patient holograms that will bring the value of standardized patients to health care programs at a fraction of the cost and with much less complexity to deliver.”

Pearson is currently focusing on creating simulations with a patient going through the stages of anaphylaxis progressing to respiratory failure, an elderly patient that needs to be evaluated for physical and cognitive pathologies and a patient experiencing a progressive decline in either their physical or cognitive state.

Pearson is looking to apply their hologram technology across disciplines by creating three dimensional holographic models that will allow students to observe phenomena in chemistry, anatomy, physiology, history, mathematics, economics, art and design in three-dimensional detail.

Visit www.pearsonhighered.com/about-us.html for more information regarding their educational and technological initiatives. For more information on the F. Marie Hall SimLife Center, visit www.ttuhsc.edu.