About Goggleminds
Goggleminds creates and deploys virtual reality based training simulations to help healthcare professionals and medical students practise and learn clinical skills. These learning experiences mimic what would normally happen in real life, but reduce risk by offering an alternative to practising on real people. It also allows learners to repeat the learning experiences by accessing these simulations as many times as they want, which you would not get in real life for various reasons.
Azize Naji, director of Goggleminds, shares his Clwstwr experiences.
There is a massive need for easily accessible healthcare training and education
The World Health Organisation estimates we need an extra 10 million healthcare workers around the world just to meet the basic health care provision. If we look at the UK, there are currently over 130,000 vacancies in the NHS and another 100,000 vacancies in social care. To be able to get people to train up to become nurses, doctors, surgeons and all of the other professions that serve the NHS and healthcare and social care system, we really need to support the training of this workforce.
After I graduated from university, I worked in the NHS in England and in Wales and in the private healthcare sector. I was experiencing problems firsthand and hearing from other people having the same problem: how do you get education delivered in a way that's successful, effective and engaging? Typically, to meet demand, healthcare providers and medical schools will use elearning or traditional methods like PowerPoint or face to face teaching. The problem with this is it's just not effective and it's really difficult to resource because of gaps in the workforce.
My Master’s degree inspired me to start a VR healthtech project
I was finishing my Master’s dissertation on the subject of using VR to train nurses in healthcare. I'd read hundreds of papers, and was overwhelmed by the evidence for it. That, coupled with my own research, made me think about starting a project. I approached Clwstwr after seeing a post on social media by pure chance. I spoke to one of the team about what I was thinking about, and they were very supportive and encouraged me to apply for funding. I applied for around £10,000 to do a feasibility study.
At this point, Goggleminds was just an idea
I had built some very basic simulation programmes for research purposes as part of my Master's degree, nothing amazing. I knew what we needed, what people were telling me they needed and I had some idea of how to build it. The aim of my feasibility study was to look at the gamification and accessibility of a training simulation using virtual reality to train healthcare professionals. It was a very short, snappy project, lasting three or four months. It was a great success, from which we’ve built some traction to get where we are today.
My first focus was to get the right people together to actually build it
I'm not a developer myself, although I have some experience now, so I needed people with that experience. We had a couple of interns join us (who are still here today as staff) then we built the product. Also, we managed to get into Oxford University Hospitals quite early on and have a really good relationship with them, which meant our creation was actually being tried, tested and used in the medical environment.
The first product was a tracheostomy emergency management module. We went through various rounds of building and deploying the tech then testing and collecting data, reporting on everything along the way. It was a very quick turnaround.
We spent time considering what makes a good simulation
It's multifaceted, and there's not a lot of conclusive research. There are things like immersion, which is the level of which you are cognitively immersed into a simulation. Then you've got the visual elements and how appealing the visuals are. You've also got presence, which is the state to which you feel like you’re actually in the virtual space. Then you've also got haptics, which is the thing most companies focus on around VR.
Before you can look at haptics, you need to get the presence and immersion in VR correct. If you don't feel present and immersed in a virtual scenario, it doesn't matter what level of haptics you have; the user won’t be in the right frame of mind to access the educational learning cycle, so it’s pretty much ineffective.
There are many things you can do to improve immersion, some of which are secret
Many are quite widely known. Things like the level of detail in the graphics matter. Blocky graphics in simulations can create lag and don’t look very convincing, so they aren’t great. Lag can make the user nauseous, which ruins the experience and makes it ineffective.
Other things like the actual interactivity within a simulation can have an impact on immersion. Some companies, for example, use 360° videos, which is an easy entry point into this market. But, you can't interact with that environment like you would in our simulation. Having those elements of engagement and interaction during the simulation helps in the learning cycle. We also have our unique virtual patients that come to life; when you interact with them, by talking or moving, they speak and move like real people. The closer we can mimic real life, the better the immersion and the stronger the educational potential.
We prioritise illnesses that cause the most negative outcomes for staff and for people generally
We focus on what’s causing significant harm to people around the world and skills that are really difficult to practise in real life. For example, sepsis kills one person in the world every few seconds. It's really quite frightening. We see that we have the potential to make an impact there, so that’s one of the illnesses we're currently focusing on.
After our feasibility stage, we were awarded more Clwstwr funding to build our platform
We found from our first project that people really enjoyed our simulations and found them useful and effective. We were hitting all the key points. However, one of the recurring themes was accessibility. VR is constantly developing, but while the adoption rate is starting to increase it's not at mass adoption level. Almost everyone has an iPhone or Android, but not everyone has a VR headset.
So, we started looking at how we can increase the accessibility to give those experiences to a wider audience. One of the ways that we've done that was by developing a web based platform so that anybody with a laptop, tablet or desktop computer can access these simulations on a 2D screen. It's not the same level of immersion as VR, but it's still very interactive and gamified.
Since finishing this second stage, we’ve been scaling our product to increase accessibility
VR is for full immersion while desktop is for scalability. There are 1.4 million people in the NHS in the UK, rising to 3 million people if you include social care. Globally, health and social care professionals total around 55 million people. We really need a way to scale training without being restricted by equipment, so that’s key to our journey now. Eventually, VR will catch up. I think within the next three years, we'll be at mass adoption level with VR.
Clwstwr’s been a great kick-start for us
I'll forever remember the support we had from Clwstwr. I'm still in contact with some of the team there. It’s been a real privilege.
There's lots that we want to do in the future. We’re always looking at new technologies and how we can incorporate them into what we do. One of the areas that we're currently looking at is the use of artificial intelligence. Our virtual patients are mimicking real people in real life in how they move and how they speak, but what we want to do is give them a level of, I daresay, intelligence. It’d enable them to be more dynamic in real time with our learners.
As a business, we’re looking at the global market. We've already been out to America a couple of times and we're speaking of some big organisations out there. We want to focus on Africa too. There are 11 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that have zero access to medical education, so we're building a project which is looking at serving that population.
The feedback from users has been excellent
We’ve got some research papers that we're publishing around the efficacy of our training programmes, covering effectiveness, engagement levels and that sort of thing. It's something we really pride ourselves on and it motivates us to keep improving.
We are currently trying to make our training platform as accessible as possible
Our key objective is to get it out to as many people as possible. I didn't start the business to make money - it was to solve a problem. Currently, we work with healthcare providers at a higher level and through medical schools, but we have got some plans to change up that business model in a way that hasn’t been done before.
We're doing a lot of work with schools at the moment too, through our Future Minds initiative. Not everybody has the opportunity to learn about healthcare, or to do so in the right environment for them. We've been going into schools, predominantly in areas the Welsh councils classify as being socially deprived, to provide schoolchildren with the experience of being a medic in virtual reality. They get the experience of being a doctor or nurse on a ward, trying to help or save the patient, with the idea that they might become inspired by that and consider a career in healthcare.