Virtual Reality to improve teaching in Basic Life Support

The survival rate after cardiac arrest is highly dependent on the period before a bystander starts correct CPR. Among others, a mental threshold to proceed to CPR and the correct execution of the CPR technique under stress or a non-standard situation, play a role in the victim's chances of survival.  Virtual Reality is a promising educational form to teach CPR because one can create scenarios that are very close to reality. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of Basic Life Support training in VR: On the one hand, whether BLS training in VR contributes to the correct execution of the resuscitation technique, and on the other hand, whether training in a VR environment involves increased stress as seen during a real intervention. The latter is valuable to learn how to cope with this stress in a controlled environment. The final objective of this project is to investigate which parameters within VR training have an impact on the effectiveness of the training. The research results from this project will further contribute to the optimization of a VR application for BLS. Such an application can be an effective and cost-efficient method for resuscitation training, which can be widely used.