All Your Base Are Blog to Us

Took the shuttle between UP and HMC at 6:30 am on friday (which meant I had to be up at 5:00 am - ugh!). The shuttle is a very bouncy ride, whether it's the van or the small bus. The air conditioning on the bus was broken on the way home, so that part of the trip wasn't good.

Anyway, I got there around 8:30 and Dr. Pott met me where the shuttle dropped me off. After chatting a bit about what he wanted to do, he took me on a tour of their simulation room, where if you'd gone to his presentation at the TLT Symposium or watched his video, you saw the dummies that they had to practice on. Here are the pix:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/besong/sets/72157600692216459/

There were partials there that just consisted of a head and windpipe that the students practiced on. I tried it myself and it's not exactly easy at first. He showed me the scope they use that has a camera on the end of a long, maneuverable stem to help them find their way thru the body. There were different sized dummies including infant and toddler sized to give them practice on the varying shapes and sizes they would be dealing with. There were dummy arms there, too, for practicing IVs.

The big dummy (I keep thinking of Sanford and Son), which was a full body, cost about $250,000 and it cost them about $60,000 per year to run the room where it's housed. They can make the dummy do a lot of things from the control room. It can simulate breathing, eyes dilate, emit fluids, sounds, etc, making for a realistic experience for the students being evaluated. The person in the control room can make the dummy go into some sort of trauma to see how the students react as well.

The idea behind the simulation room is that students would practice on the partial dummies to get the physical skill down. The flat screen simulations (like the one I worked on) would teach the mental skills necessary. The big dummy would test not only their physical and mental ability, but also how they can react under pressure.

We then talked at length in his office and he showed me some other anesthesia simulations, some of which were quite complicated. His idea is to not make something quite so complicated, but create a simulation in such a way that other simulations for other areas in the medical center could benefit from as well. I furthered the idea that this could also be done with other disciplines that require decision-making such as engineering and business, for example.

I then showed him in detail what I had done and how it works. Once a decision tree is created, that is translated into a FileMaker Pro database, which is pretty simple to set up. He was able to grasp that right away. From there I would export the database as an XML file for Flash to read. If he had a live FileMaker database, I explained, he could read directly from the server the same way the XML file is read. This is the route he wants to go. Someone there has a FileMaker database on a server, so he will work with that person to develop a database for this project. He wants to do it from a FileMaker server so that he can control and update the content and be able to track usage.

Some new wrinkles he talked about were to have an input text box for each set of choices so that a student can suggest another possible alternative and thereby update the database quickly by capturing the input.

Another ideas was to have a timer on each scene so that if the student took too long, another scene might be triggered automatically ("Your patient is now dead.").

Another was playing on the probability of outcomes. That is, they can say that doing a certain thing would have an 80% chance of a positive result, so 20% of the time, he wants the negative result to occur to add to the realism. I thought we could do this using a random number method in Flash without too much trouble.

We then took a coffee break and chatted outside under the building where they had a breezeway and courtyard. Some guys were on ladders and ropes cleaning the windows of the building above us. A young woman was smoking on a bench there and Dr. Pott went over to admonish her for doing so, since it is a smoke-free campus. She apologised and put out her cigarette. After a minute she got up and walked from where she was. Just as she did we heard a shout and a large pail of soapy water came crashing down where she was sitting. I told her that stopping smoking was already starting to save her life.

We then went to see an operating room where they had an anesthesia cart, so I could take a couple pictures and see how they worked. We had to wait because they were administering shock therapy to a suicidal mental health patient. Would have been fun to watch. It was some older lady that they wheeled out in a few minutes. I mentioned that I didn't think they did shock therapy anymore, and Dr. Pott stated that it is still a quite effective means of preventing suicidal patients from taking their lives when they reach a critical point. They can then get them more therapy. He says it is especially effective on older patients.

After lunch, we talked again in his office and he raised the idea of possibly teaching a workshop at an international conference in San Diego the first week of January. He wanted me to help with the technical end of it. It would be a workshop on creating quick, simple simulations for teaching anesthesia and other medical disciplines. I was willing to help out, but said that it would have to be worked out at a higher level before he would submit an abstract. He would like to come up to UP at some point and talk with Cole and John about his project plans.

Going forward, he is going to work with his colleague to set up a FileMaker database for his project. I'll look into it a little more after that and see if I can interface with it and possibly get some of the other suggestions incorporated into the sim.

Work on my museum kiosk project sort of ground to a halt for a while. I was about half done with it, and didn't want to go any further till they got me some content. I know how an interface can change once the content starts rolling in. I recently visited the guys in charge and they were pretty happy with my progress so far. I switched the kiosk interface from being text file based to XML. This should allow them to eventually go to a server-based Filemaker Pro database to serve up the content for the kiosk.

Just to quickly get something to show them, I made separate Filemaker files for each of the first few letters of the alphabet. This, I know, wasn't the best approach in the longrun. Even though it was easier than flat text files it was still pretty unwieldy to have 26 separate files. I did a web tutorial last week on XML and integration into Flash and gained a much better understanding of what I could do with it. By adding a few more fields in the FileMaker database and exporting a different way, I figured that I should be able to slice and dice all the info any way I want using a single FileMaker database. This would be a great time saver for the museum in regards to upkeep.

The tricky part was that the info has to but sliced up in 3 different ways: Print media (writers and photographers), radio, and TV. Some people do more than one thing. It would be easy to make a separate FileMaker DB for each, but I found a good way to just combine them all. I put a field in the DB for Print, one for Radio, and one for TV. If the person is associated with any of these media, I put a "Y" (yes) in the field. In Flash when I load the frame for Radio personnel, for example, I'll just have it make an array of all the people who have a Y in the Radio field. From there, I can sort by last name. Pretty simple and I didn't need XPath to do it, either. What I learned about XML is that it will create an array of nodes automatically if you ask it for all the childNodes at a given level of the XML file. I was able to easily home in on the data I needed once I understood this concept. XML had always sort of escaped me before, but now I can really appreciate what you can do with it. I can be thick as a brick about a lot of coding concepts, but once I finally get it, it is always worth the extra effort.