School of Medicine and Health Sciences Poster Presentations
Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Intervention on Fatigue, Alertness, Stress among Emergency Medicine Residents
Document Type
Poster
Abstract Category
Clinical Specialties
Keywords
Virtual reality, emergency, stress, residents, wellness
Publication Date
Spring 5-1-2019
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) has shown promise as a tool in medical education. Our study aims to examine application of VR on anxiety, stress, confidence, alertness and fatigue of clinicians during an ER shift. We prospectively enrolled a convenience sample of EM resident volunteers. We gave them ten-minute breaks halfway through their shifts; the break was either “wild type” (WT) during which they did whatever they chose or an immersive VR activity. We used a Samsung Gear Headset with games, travel, and relaxation content from AppliedVR.  Residents were surveyed on their alertness, stress, anxiety, confidence, and fatigue at the beginning, before and after their break, and end of shifts (day, evening or swing). A Psychomotor Vigilance Test was given at each interval to objectively measure alertness. Various statistical analyses such as factorial design, time series, linear and logistic regression, categorical and t-test were used to analyze the data. We measured 115 events. Resident demographics were a mean (+SE) age of 31.7(+1.34),   55.6% female and 55.6% white. The incidence of Lapses was significantly associated with Break Time (p=0.036), resident (p=0.002), and shift (p=0.031) but not the intervention (p=0.21).  It was negatively correlated with efficiency (r=-0.85. p<0.000) and positively associated with Mean Response Time (r=0.85, p<0.000). Efficiency was significantly associated with the resident (p<0.000) and Break Time (p=0.008) but unrelated to intervention (p=0.82). Similar results were obtained (using factorial analysis of variance) for anxiety, stress, and alertness. Fatigue was not associated with shift, p=0.42, but significantly associated with break time (p=0.002) and intervention (p=0.05).  Specifically, the residents being exposed to WT had significantly lower fatigue levels after adjusting for other factors (4.38 vs. 5.18, p=0.05) Due to large variations in this small pool of residents, we did not see any significant effects of the VR intervention; however, after adjusting for other confounding variables, the intervention had some effects on fatigue and warrants further investigation.
Open Access
1
Evaluation of a Virtual Reality Intervention on Fatigue, Alertness, Stress among Emergency Medicine Residents
Virtual reality (VR) has shown promise as a tool in medical education. Our study aims to examine application of VR on anxiety, stress, confidence, alertness and fatigue of clinicians during an ER shift. We prospectively enrolled a convenience sample of EM resident volunteers. We gave them ten-minute breaks halfway through their shifts; the break was either “wild type” (WT) during which they did whatever they chose or an immersive VR activity. We used a Samsung Gear Headset with games, travel, and relaxation content from AppliedVR.  Residents were surveyed on their alertness, stress, anxiety, confidence, and fatigue at the beginning, before and after their break, and end of shifts (day, evening or swing). A Psychomotor Vigilance Test was given at each interval to objectively measure alertness. Various statistical analyses such as factorial design, time series, linear and logistic regression, categorical and t-test were used to analyze the data. We measured 115 events. Resident demographics were a mean (+SE) age of 31.7(+1.34),   55.6% female and 55.6% white. The incidence of Lapses was significantly associated with Break Time (p=0.036), resident (p=0.002), and shift (p=0.031) but not the intervention (p=0.21).  It was negatively correlated with efficiency (r=-0.85. p<0.000) and positively associated with Mean Response Time (r=0.85, p<0.000). Efficiency was significantly associated with the resident (p<0.000) and Break Time (p=0.008) but unrelated to intervention (p=0.82). Similar results were obtained (using factorial analysis of variance) for anxiety, stress, and alertness. Fatigue was not associated with shift, p=0.42, but significantly associated with break time (p=0.002) and intervention (p=0.05).  Specifically, the residents being exposed to WT had significantly lower fatigue levels after adjusting for other factors (4.38 vs. 5.18, p=0.05) Due to large variations in this small pool of residents, we did not see any significant effects of the VR intervention; however, after adjusting for other confounding variables, the intervention had some effects on fatigue and warrants further investigation.
Comments
Presented at Research Days 2019.