News
September 2011
What an Amazing Place! WID's Living Environments Laboratory
Patricia "Patti" Brennan uses 3-D goggles and a wand to manipulate objects in a virtual kitchen environment within the confines of the CAVE. (Photo: Todd Brown) Patti Brennan is talking about baby formula. Mixing it!
Turns out, there's more to it than you'd think. In fact, Brennan, the Lillian S. Moehlman- Bascom Professor of Nursing and Industrial Engineering at the UW–Madison, is using this more-complicated-than-it-looks activity to highlight the new CAVE simulation room in the Living Environments Lab at the new $210 million Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID)—a public and private research endeavor for multidisciplinary collaboration. The simulation room will help nursing researchers break down the seemingly simplest tasks to make them safer and more efficient. Okay, all well and good....
But baby formula? It's just mix and measure, right? Uh, well, not exactly.
"We created a virtual simulation scenario for making baby formula," Brennan explains, "figuring most people can envision themselves doing it. They understand where they do it—in the kitchen. So when you come to our exhibition at WID, right now there is a wall depicting a kitchen. By wearing goggles, you will have the experience of actually being in that kitchen, and you will be given the task of making baby formula. You'll be told there's water for the formula in the refrigerator, and the powder and the baby bottles are over on the counter. You'll use a wand to actually mix the baby formula. That will help people understand and get a good sense of what virtual reality is and how we're going to use it to re-create home environments and study common health-related tasks in context."
Still, after people have put on the 3-D simulation goggles, picked up the wand, and mixed some virtual baby formula, what else can be learned?
"That making baby formula is a task that takes two hands," Brennan answers. "You have to hold the canister with one hand and flip the top up with the other. Or, you hold the bottle and unscrew the top. You use two hands. Most people who are making baby formula only have one hand because they're holding a baby. So we're already learning that a common task that people assume can be done with two hands with no problem … well, when we put people in a realistic environment, we begin to understand the complexity of what we might have initially thought was a simple task. And that's why we have the CAVE."
The Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), an immersive virtual reality environment where images are projected onto the walls of a room-sized cube, is the centerpiece of the Living Environments Laboratory (LEL), which was designed for Brennan and her colleagues to develop health care strategies that encourage shifting care from hospitals to homes using diagnostic technologies and methodologies for patient assessment and education. Brennan says an aging populace demands health care options that fit with less effort into more active lives. She wants to develop technology, then, that will shift service delivery away from sterile laboratories, hospital rooms, and office suites to patients' own bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and cars.
Brennan envisions a home health care environment that monitors traditional vital signs—heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature—as well as observations in daily living (more subtle metrics such as expired carbon dioxide, time spent in bed, and speed of gait) to help practitioners, family members, and patients alike make timely and individualized diagnosis and treatment decisions. The LEL is intended to be used by nurses, biomedical and chemical engineers, fabric and environmental designers, bioinformatics developers, and contributors from other disciplines to collaborate on health care projects that require their varied expertise.
Brennan says the School of Nursing will be linked to WID in several ways. Faculty will serve on the Living Environments Laboratory Advisory Committee to "help us understand the things about nursing that we need to keep fresh in our perspective on the problem." The school will also help advertise to the nursing community for faculty positions at WID.
Significantly, Brennan sees the school and the lab as being inextricably linked in the future through state-of-the-art facilities in the new School of Nursing building, which will be designed to connect with WID and the CAVE.
"We're going to have an apartment in the school's new building that's a close replica of a physical simulation," Brennan says. "We'll be able to study behaviors and, because of the way we're designing it, we're going to have it instrumented with sensors all around so we can watch people moving in space. We'll have a bedroom so we can understand the body mechanics of helping an elderly person get out of bed to go to the bathroom. When we capture this behavior in the physical environment, we'll be able to render it in the instrument environment of the CAVE. This should allow us to understand and analyze the information and develop safer techniques as well as more appropriate technologies.
"This is a vision for five years from now at the School of Nursing. We'll be able to observe real behavior, capture it, render it in the CAVE, and study ways of making it better. In ten years, we envision that, before you're discharged from treatment, we'll be sending a robot into your house to take pictures and to render that in the CAVE. We'll then understand how you move through your house, and we can teach you how to move through it before you return there—Where are the obstacles, the steps, the furniture in your way? We'll be able to plan better, creating a home environment that will be healthier for an individual."
To achieve ambitious, futuristic ends, Brennan says, the first WID research project will monitor a person completing both an action in the real world and that same action in the virtual world. She says that she wants to calibrate the muscle strain or the kind of leaning, sitting, or standing that goes into the action.
"Second, we'll try to understand how visual cues alter psychological response," she says. "We will explore this by creating a statistical model of clutter. We don't know how much clutter has to exist to make people feel disoriented or distracted. If you're doing a precise task at home—measuring medication for your child—you don't want too much clutter around."
To model and analyze the phenomenon, a computer scientist on Brennan's team will study how to create a space and add visual cues to increase an individual's sense of clutter and then work out the measurements to the personal response to visual cues.
"Creating good, useful tools for home care," adds Brennan, "may rely on understanding where activities— more than what activities—get done."
For more information visit: Living Environments Laboratory