From April 2022, NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine will be leveraging Microsoft’s holographic technology to teach medical and nursing undergraduates.
Named Project Polaris, this collaboration will see the use of Microsoft HoloLens 2 to project three-dimensional (3D) holograms to give medical and nursing students a visual appreciation of actual clinical scenarios in practice.
The suite of instructional software – developed by the team from NUS Medicine and Microsoft Industry Solutions – will enable students to practise clinical procedural skills, such as inserting a cannula and inserting catheters in male and female urinary tracts, using mixed reality technology.
According to the School’s Assistant Dean for Education and coproject lead, Associate Professor Alfred Kow, Project Polaris comes with three levels of difficulty to allow students at varying levels of competence to achieve the highest standards of clinical practice in a safe space.
Polaris is part of a larger programme called Project Horizon, which consists of other initiatives like Project Delphinus and Project Mira.
Those efforts aim to train students in clinical soft skills and clinical anatomy respectively, positioning NUS Medicine as the first in Southeast Asia to introduce holographic mixed reality as a teaching tool to train medical and nursing students.
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“We are continually pursuing new and innovative teaching methods to help medical and nursing students better understand the medical curriculum and gain a new appreciation for healthcare and health, while striving to maintain a balance with time-tested traditional approaches,” says Associate Professor Lau Tang Ching, the School’s vice-dean for Education.
He adds: “This incorporation of holographic mixed-reality learning fits in well with our teaching initiatives, and we hope to see this collaboration with Microsoft flourish in the coming years.”
Commenting on the partnership, Richard Koh, national technology officer at Microsoft Singapore, says: “As one of the few hospitals in Southeast Asia that has a tertiary education arm which collaborates with a training hospital, NUS Medicine is in a unique position to use mixed reality solutions and the Microsoft HoloLens 2 to aid in the transformation of healthcare education, for years to come.”
Photo: Microsoft Singapore and NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine
