Potentially life-saving app developed at Illinois State University
NORMAL, Ill. (WMBD) — A new mixed-reality app out of Illinois State University allows you to train to save a life from anywhere.
VENT, which stands for Virtual Reality-Embedded Training, is a program on the Apple Vision Pro goggles that teaches you how to administer Narcan should an overdose event happen.
The app was developed solely by Matt Kase, who was a graduate student from Illinois State University when he came up with the app.
Roy Magnuson, director of emerging technologies for instruction and research, had Kase in his class, where Kase was taught this kind of software.
'I was getting a master's degree [at ISU], and I was in his virtual reality development class, and that was the first time I was introduced to that,' Kase said.
Magnuson had come up with the idea, and tasked Kase to make the plan into a reality, or a mixed-reality at that.
'He knew that I kind of had a background in neuroscience,' Kase said. 'So this was a project that he was already planning without me, and then he had asked me to be the developer on it.'
Kase worked on it from February to May of last year, and then it went to testing at SIU from May to December.
Magnuson said this kind of a tool is to add a convenience to work that would otherwise take a lot of time to do.
'Technology should be there to create this one solution that you can't get in some other way,' Magnuson said. 'I do feel pretty confident, you know, this app… it's not it's not a replacement for a human, but it does allow for that scalability. You can solve that problem [so we don't] have 10,000 trainers running out to 10,000 places all at the same time.'
The program was developed through a partnership between ISU's Mennonite College of Nursing, Southern Illinois University and OSF Peoria.
Kase said he would like to develop it into a game at some point that gives you points for doing the training, and change it up a little to make it more competitive.
'What I'd like to do in the future,' Kase said, 'is make it fully virtual after you complete that mixed reality training where there's distractions in your environment and you have to run through the process that you just learned and you get a score or something.'
The app is only available on the Apple Vision Pro goggles currently, but they hope to distribute the program to other virtual reality devices at a later date.
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