Engineers help create laboratory for nursing dummies

Acumen Engineering of Burnaby, B.C. did the electrical and audiovisual design for a series of “immersive” nursing simulation laboratories at Douglas College’s David Lam campus in Coquitlam.
The laboratories are built to look exactly like a hospital ward, with everything from beds, to nurse call stations, to medical gases and even the paint colours on the walls, explains Phi Ho, P.Eng. of Acumen. The college also has three laboratories fitted out as homecare environments.
The spaces are intensively rigged with cameras and audiovisual equipment to record how the nurses treat mannequin patients. These dummy “simmen” and “simbabies,” are electronically controlled to exhibit symptoms. Meanwhile human actors pretend to be doctors and relatives. The trainee nurses’ actions and responses are recorded on camera for a review session later on with their instructors.