Creating a patient state for Pediatric respiratory distress simulation in Unity

Pulse Physiology Engine
1

Hi there!

My team and I are working on creating a pediatric respiratory distress simulation in Unity, specifically for the Oculus Quest. I’m unsure about how to create a custom pediatric patient state, similar to the standard patient states that you have provided within the Unity Asset, without going into the JSON file and manually editing each variable.

Any help and guidance will be really appreciated.

Cheers,
Aiden

2

Hi Aiden

Pulse currently does not model pediatric physiology.
We do have some NIH submissionsin to do so, but no pediatric support yet.

Depending on what lessons you are trying to impress within your training simulation, you may be able to get away with adult physiology while we work out the support of validated petiatric physiology.

Patient state creation for game based learning is achieved through the use of the Pulse explorer found here: https://gitlab.kitware.com/physiology/explorer/-/wikis/home

Pulse has the ability to (very quickly)save/load a json (or binary) state file of the engine at any time.
We use the explorer to create a patient state.
This usually consists of

  1. Setting the initial healthy patient baseline values like age, sex, height, weight, resting HR and BP
  2. Add any chronic conditions like ARDS or COPD in your case
  3. Start the engine, this will take in all those values and stablize the cardiovascular and respiratory systems to all the values you set in 1, then stabilize the engine to all the values you set in 2. This generally takes a minute or two
  4. The engine clock will start ticking and you will see vitals plots in the Explorer
  5. Next we use actions to achieve the vitals that we want for the patient
  6. Once the patient state is where we want it, we add a Serialization action to create a Pulse state file.
  7. We save out the Scenario file from the scenario tab, A scenario hass everything you did in 1, 2, 5, and 6 so you can easily repeat this process to get a new state file for newer versions of Pulse

So that is 2 file, a state file for your Unity game, and a scenario file to regenerate the state file

This can be a pretty tricky process to get a patient right where you want them. Sometimes SME vital requirements can actually be counter to each other as well.

So take a look at the explorer and this process and let us know if you have any questions
Note we currently only have a Windows version of the Explorer, we are working on getting a Mac version built, and Linux versions. But if you can pretty easily build those versions to run on your machines if you so brave.

Thanks!

3

Hi Abray,

Understood! Thanks for your response

Best,
Aiden