The Core Skills Trainer: A Set of Haptic Games for Practicing Key Clinical Skills

A new approach to teaching the skills used by health professionals during hands-on (palpation-based) examinations and procedures is reported, where students practice individual ‘core’ skills by playing haptic computer games. These core palpatory skills were identified through interviews and a survey of clinicians and include determining size, firmness, shape and moving and thinking in 3D. A learning environment using haptic force-feedback technology (The Core Skills Trainer) was created that consisted of a set of eight computer games, one game for each core skill. Concepts from computer gaming were used to help engage students in the learning process including acquiring points, losing lives, different levels of difficulty and high scores tables. Each game has three levels of difficulty to support progressive improvement and the player’s ultimate task is to become proficient in all the core skills.