Project TOUCH
Telehealth Outreach for Unified Community Health
A multi-year collaboration between the Schools of Medicine at the
University of Hawaii and the University of New Mexico, which was developed to integrate
advanced technologies into education and training to enhance experiential distributed
learning, aimed at improving human comprehension, retention of knowledge, and ultimate
performance. Employs medical case scenarios as virtual models to make learning of
critical concepts relevant and translatable to real-life application. Deploys and
distributes these methods to remote training sites using the Next Generation Internet
(NGI) Access Grid.
- Applies immersive virtual reality and creation of virtual worlds to enhance learning
by allowing visualization and exploration of abstract concepts or virtual patients and
simulations, along with collaborative virtual group interaction.
- Uses "Flatland" as the virtual reality visualization environment, which can be shared
among dispersed sites with multiple participants.
- Uses the Access Grid - A broadband Next Generation Internet videoconference multicasting
network to allow real-time distribution of the learning environments between academic
medical centers and distant training sites,
- Employs an experiential learning approach using realistic medical scenarios and
associated models in the virtual environments to better understand complex concepts and
translation to real-world applications.
Project TOUCH :: The project described was funded by grant 2 D1B TM 00003-03 from the
Office for the Advancement of Telehealth, Health Resources and Services Administration,
Department of Health and Human Services. Its contents are solely the responsibility
of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Health Resources
and Services Administration.
