The COVID19 pandemic has had profound effects on healthcare delivery and education. From the clinical side, we see yet again how POCUS plays an important role in patient triage, assessment and monitoring. From the education side, we are seeing a swell of interest in simulation not only as a teaching technique, but also as a process testing tool that can help refine our approach to novel challenges in acute care. As we move into the next phases of the pandemic, both POCUS and simulation will continue to play their roles.
From a teaching perspective, as we adapt some of our students’ clinical experiences during the pandemic, increased use of simulated clinical care seems reasonable. With that in mind, we are thrilled to release our newest update of USASK’s Emergency Department UltraSound Simulator (edus2), now downloadable to any windows laptop and much easier to use through the power of Java!
If you want to run edus2j on your laptop (for your sim lab, or small group teaching sessions, in-situ sim, wherever) here are the steps:
Assemble a transducer and purchase RFID tags using our instructions on the GitHub page or contact sasksonic@gmail.com to order a transducer (built from a hollowed deodorant stick as seen above). You can run the program on any windows-based laptop (it will take up about ~ 100MB all total)
Once the hardware is ready, plug in the probe and create an edus2 folder on your desktop. In that folder, create sub-folders for 1) video library 2) saved scenarios 3) saved mannequins
Download Java, edus2j and our video library here
Download Java: https://www.java.com/en/download/
Download edus2j: https://github.com/camauser/edus2j/releases/download/1.3/edus2j.jar
Download our edus2 video library: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/55zd96yda694amc/AACcsAV2kYtXhMlS8QO1ec_ka?dl=0
Then watch our instructional videos:
1Watch video 1 on downloading Java and the edus2j program onto your computer (for free) https://vimeo.com/427519450
2. Watch video 2 on running the simulator, designating mannequins, and uploading videos https://vimeo.com/427519524
3. Video 3 creating scenarios and exporting mannequins. https://vimeo.com/427519597
Let us know if you need a hand!
cheers,
Cameron Auser, BSc @camauser
Malcolm Whyte, BSc
Paul Olszynski, MD @olszynskip
Huge thanks to the team at the USASK CLRC for their patience and feedback during beta testing!
Welcome to Sasksonic - a virtual hub for Point of Care Ultrasound at the University of Saskatchewan 