ORLANDO, Fla. – The University of Central Florida is changing up or better yet, beaming up the game for healthcare students.
“Whether it’s our speech pathology students who are learning anatomy and physiology or neuromotor disorders or language development or our physical therapy students,” Associate Dean of Clinical Affairs College of Health Professionals and Sciences Bari Hoffman said.
Hoffman spearheaded the project to incorporate hologram technology in the classroom.
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“This allows us to really expand and provide a very deep and expansive repertoire of patient experiences and severity levels,” Hoffman said.
According to UCF, the school is the first university worldwide to incorporate this new technology. It was purchased for $75,000 with a donation from Brooks rehabilitation.
“I thought about the opportunity that it presented us to share patient experiences, more humanistic elements of patient care,” Bari said.
With the use of a 4K high-resolution camera, patients from anywhere can “beam themselves” into UCF where students will analyze and learn more about their conditions. The lesson can be done either live or prerecorded.
“The idea of being able to have lifelike depictions of patients, their stories, their symptom profiles really just unlocks the possibilities of how we can teach and train our students better,” Bari said.
For Lauren Bislick Wilson, an assistant professor at the School of Communications Sciences and Disorders, the new learning method will help students who hope to become speech therapists.
“The students have the opportunity to see the physical manifestations of the disorder and that’s important because in a speech a lot of what we are working with we hear, right? It’s perceptual; we hear the breakdown in their speech or in their language or in their communication,” Bislick Wilson said. “We can also bring in more rare populations that maybe they won’t see during their educational training.”
A game-changer in health education the university said.
“They’re not limited to you know, a one or two-dimensional video; they feel as if that patient is right there looking in their eyes telling them their lived experience, sharing their symptom profile,” Bari said.