Steven van Campen showing his digital gubbe - Photo: Tomas van Dijk
In disaster training, the maximum number of victims should be helped with the limited means available. The iPod-based victims that Steven van Campen developed will actually ‘die’ when not properly cared for.
Even the biggest disaster relief operations usually start with a phone call from an eyewitness, someone reporting a collision on a motorway, for example. But once in the scene, the accident turns out to be a massive pile-up, including a leaking patrol truck, a van transporting radioactive materials and, wedged in between, a family car with injured but still-alive children in the backseat.
This is the scenario that the popular Dutch science series, ‘Jules Unlimited’, created to introduce its audience to the concept of disaster management logistics.
“The first mistake people make”, the trainer on the TV show explains, “is to act intuitively; that is, they immediately start treating the first victim they encounter without being aware of other victims who might be in a more critical state, or of dangerous substances that may endanger their own safety.”
“The main problem is to get the injured from the spot in time”, says traumatologist, Professor Tore Vikström, from the University of Linköping in Sweden. In the late 1980s, Vikström developed the EmergoTrain System to coach disaster managers in their tasks. The system looks like child’s play, featuring cardboard patients, ambulance drivers, intensive care nurses, surgeons and like, with the victims based on database information about hundreds of actual accident victims.
The cardboard puppet(s) (gubbe or gubbar (plural) in Swedish), which serves as the victim of the accident, very concisely reveals its vital signs (conscious, breathing, injuries, bleeding or not, heart rate), at which point it’s up to the team of trainees to decide what to do: to treat the puppet immediately (red), to treat it later (yellow), or to leave it unattended (green).
“I was amazed by how animated people got discussing the fate of a cardboard puppet on a magnetic whiteboard”, says Martin Boosman, from e-semble, a serious gaming and simulation software company that trains incident response managers. “Two students even started a fight over it. The instructor literally had to pull them apart to allow them to cool down.”
Boosman, who has developed the computer-based incident command-training tool Isee, which he describes as “a Playmobile for disaster scenarios set on a computer”, originally thought he could easily improve on Emergotrain’s cardboard figures and whiteboards. Isee is much more advanced in that it shows participants a map of the region, a virtual reality disaster site and the locations of hospitals and other help centres. All very sophisticated, but, as the disaster training unfolds, people taking the course tend to fall silent and become absorbed in their computer screens. No shouting here on behalf of the supposed victims.
In other words, the social interaction fell short of what typically happens in an Emergotrain setting. But this is where Steven van Campen comes in. Having already graduated as an aeronautical engineer, Van Campen wanted to do a second MSc degree in industrial design. His mission was to combine the oversight of computer-based Isee with the interaction of Emergotrain.
“An MSc student at Industrial Design should be able to integrate ergonomics and marketing into his design”, says his MSc supervisor, Professor Huib de Ridder (IDE). “Not many students achieve this, but Steven did.” Van Campen’s Master’s project was awarded a ‘9’ and he graduated cum laude.
By replacing the cardboard gubbar puppets with an iPod-touch running a specially developed application, Van Campen kept the focus on the victims, while also adding some useful features. Vital signs are now dynamic, meaning a digital gubbe will react to the treatment it receives. Meanwhile, all the important data are logged onto a central server, which provides an overview for the instructors or material for feedback after the exercise. Van Campen, who did his graduation thesis project at e-semble, plans to further develop his Digital Gubbar System (DGS) into a marketable product by linking the puppets on the whiteboard to a virtual disaster area inside a central server.
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