Hospital-acquired infections are infections contracted by patients in hospitals. The goal of hand hygiene is to use targeted disinfection to prevent the spread of germs. ViRTUE uses a virtual environment to visualise germs and how they spread. It also shows healthcare professionals when hand disinfection is necessary and when it is superfluous.
Image: Ateo
The difficulty in learning good hand hygiene is that germs, be they bacteria, fungal spores or viruses, are invisible. This means that while the purpose of the routines that have to be practised may be understandable in theory, their effects are not perceptible to the senses. ViRTUE is a hand hygiene learning environment developed in Zurich. It is the brainchild of an agency, Ateo GmbH, and University Hospital Zurich. The application runs on virtual reality headsets and takes the learner into a room at University Hospital Zurich, where they have to complete an ostensibly simple task. In this virtual hospital room, there are two hospitalised patients. The task is simple: Greet patient one with a handshake, listen to their heartbeat and take their temperature. The visit to patient one is followed by a visit to patient two and a slightly different procedure. The person practising will have already made serious mistakes if they did not disinfect their hands after entering the room or when switching from patient one to patient two.
The application can show, either in real time or once the exercise has been completed, how pathogens spread and are transferred from one surface to the next: from the treatment provider to patient one and from there to patient two. ViRTUE enables medical staff to go through daily routines in a virtual environment and become aware of any mistakes. Visualing germs in a virtual environment provides a way of demonstrating hand hygiene-related mistakes in lessons so they can be discussed by the class. ViRTUE is also designed to prevent overly frequent hand disinfection, thus reducing costs and conserving resources where hundreds of visits are made every day.
Hospital-acquired infections are common. According to an assessment by the Federal Office of Public Health, around 6 percent of inpatients acquire an infectious disease during their time in a Swiss hospital. A study by Swissnoso, the National Center for Infection Control, estimates that around 5,900 people died from such infections in 2022. That is about 25 times the number of road-traffic fatalities. The magnitude of these figures and how they are to be interpreted cannot be analysed here. However, they do show the importance of hospital hygiene in general and of hand hygiene in particular, as a high proportion of germs are spread via the hands.
At present, running ViRTUE on virtual reality headsets requires an external computer with enough computing power to render the images. Moreover, the application has to be controlled by an operator. Both are set to be simplified going forwards so as to minimise the technical knowledge needed and the workload of hospital staff or instructors.
Sebastian Tobler, Managing Director of Ateo, hopes that ViRTUE will make his agency the world’s leading provider of training materials for hand hygiene. He is motivated by the need to do something about hospital-acquired infections. “The clear advantage of ViRTUE,” he says, “is that it uses a virtual environment to visualise germs and how they spread. This impresses the importance of hand hygiene on learners.”
