Show and Tell (Mostly Tell)

Here is what I've got so far on the simulation: Intubation Decisions

You should be able to navigate through the simulation to some conclusion (at the end you will not get a "Continue" button).

I just grabbed a couple photos from Google Images for now. This will be for demo purposes only and none will be used for the final project. I threw in a photo of an operating room for a background that I kind of grayed out and put a translucent panel on one side for the text to go over so it won't fight with the background. I tweaked the text sizes and placement a bit to make it more readable. Since I'm using the RadioButton components from Flash, I needed to set the text color and size programmatically instead of using the properties window. I think I need to handle the text somewhat differently in future projects in that the text placement should become dynamic so that if you have 3 lines for one scene and one line for the next scene, the text coming below them should be uniformly spaced. I will need to research this a bit, but I'm guessing it will have something to do with creating the text areas dynamically one at a time so that each will refer to the one before it for placement.

As I was working on this I was thinking - wow, it would be neat if we had some actual images of the blood pressure and other monitors such as the oxygen saturation, capnograph (an instrument to measure the CO2 concentration in an air sample), that could be changed on each scene via input from the XML file. We could also include operating room sounds and the sounds of breathing, for example to help sell the scenario. It would be simple to add a field in the FileMaker DB for an MP3 file (or several).

Another idea might be to have a coach available in the operating room. By clicking a button, a coach might appear in a video that is related to the scene you are on to help you make a decision. Something like "Your patient's chest is not rising and falling. Better check the location of the tube. It may be getting obstructed." So you might choose to reorient the tube in the simulation.

I don't want this post to get too long, so I'll quit here with a final thought about this. Now that the basic interaction is there and working, I could easily add a whole loop of frames to the simulation by paying attention to the decision tree and simply by adding records to the FileMaker DB, I can take the sim in a whole new direction, or make it do a loop and come back to a certain point in the sim. Pretty cool. I'm liking the direction this kind of thing could take.