JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Sufficient emergency preparedness is the key factor to effectively respond to and recover from major emergent infectious diseases (MEID). However, in the face of major emergent infectious diseases, public emergency preparedness is insufficient, so it is urgent to improve public emergency preparedness. The rapid development of virtual reality and human-computer interaction provides unprecedented opportunities for innovative education methods.

Objective:

To design a virtual reality interactive training system (VRITS) to provide an effective path for improvng public emergency preparedness under major emergent infectious diseases, so that the public can respond to effectively and recover from major emergent infectious diseases.

Methods:

This study takes the interactive narrative theory, situated learning theory and human-computer interaction theory as the theoretical framework to guide the design of the system. We used literature research method and Delphi method, consulted multi-disciplinary experts such as infectious diseases, disease control, psychology and public health to determine the educational content framework, and set up an interdisciplinary team to construct an operating system framework of the virtual reality interactive training system.

Results:

The virtual reality interactive training system is named the People’s War Against Pandemic. The educational content framework includes 19 knowledge, emotion and behavior skills in five aspects, such as cooperating with prevention and control work, improving emergency response ability, guaranteeing supplies and equipment, preparing economic resources and maintaining physical and mental health. The operating system framework includes virtual interactive training module, knowledge corner module, intelligent evaluation module and community forum module, and the core module is the virtual interactive training module. In this module, users control the virtual characters to move in various scenes, and then identify and analyze the controllability and harmfulness of the evolving pandemic and select the correct prevention and control strategy to avoid infecting by themselves and others.

Conclusions:

The development and sharing of multi-disciplinary theoretical framework adopted by People’s War Against Pandemic can help us clarify the design ideas and assumptions of virtual reality interactive training system, predict the training results, understand the ways of training to change the emergency knowledge, emergency emotion and behavioral responses of major emergent infectious diseases, and promote the development of more effective virtual reality interactive training system.