Virtual reality expert Erin Truesdell, in NJIT’s Ying Wu College of Computing, is designing a new kind of user interaction technology that could help cancer patients and caregivers prepare for potential complications due to fevers. Truesdell works on the technical challenges inherent in multiple people trying to simultaneously interact through virtual reality. She previously worked with VR gaming and pediatric cancer specialists at Drexel University and Yale University School of Medicine, so she signed on again to help them study how simulations can help patients understand what will happen in the event of a medical emergency.
She explained that a common emergency for blood cancer patients aged 13-39 is febrile neutropenia, when people have a low white blood cell count and a fever above 100.4 degrees. The weakened immune system leads to sepsis, where the body overproduces infection-fighting germs. Organ damage or death can result.
Doctors, scientists and software developers at the trio of universities, along with a virtual reality company in New York called Glimpse Group, are building a virtual reality environment that shows patients how to identify, react to, and clinically understand what will happen should febrile neutropenia occur. They’re funded by a National Institutes of Health grant totalling almost $400,000. To read the full story.