#simx

“Our hope is to replace the current CPR dummies that cost up to half a million dollars each with our affordable and infinitely more diverse simulation app. We’ve successfully made medical simulations 100 times cheaper, making them affordable and accessible to all hospitals and training programs in the world. Students will get hundreds of hours more hands-on training before they face real-world scenarios and real, live patients.”

The need is urgent. Improved medical training will likely reduce medical errors. In the United States, avoidable medical mistakes remain the number three killer. These accidents come in 3rd place behind heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death. They claim the lives of about 400,000 people, at a cost of some $1 trillion every year. At a recent Senate hearing, patient safety officials presented their ideas to address the problem, with technical solutions as the best hope.

The SimX team started building on the Meta SDK a year ago. The Meta 1 app enables medical students to practice a multitude of emergency medical scenarios on holographic, interactive patients. It helps prepare doctors-in-training to make the right decisions in life or death situations. The application recently won a first place at the prestigious International Meeting of the Society for Simulation for Healthcare.

SimX is about more than just medical training in wealthy parts of the world. It also has the long-term potential to revolutionize medicine in poor countries that simply cannot afford other types of advanced medical equipment. Medical schools around the world struggle to find money for basics, and SimX offers them an inexpensive way to provide sophisticated, real-life training.

Dr. Ribeira is inspired: “Imagine giving doctor’s in war-torn or disease ridden areas of the world the opportunity to improve their emergency field techniques with real-life scenarios, at a price they could actually afford.”

The SimX team ultimately decided to use the Meta SDK after attending one of Meta’s workshops.

For Ribeira, the choice was clear: “We chose to build our app on the Meta SDK over VR and tablet options because it had all the tracking features we needed. And the platform is extremely simple. No need to merge a bunch of other existing SDKs. And, importantly, the technology was appealing because of its tight Unity integration—an advantage for our team, which was already experienced in 3D environment programming on Unity.”