Immersive Training for Retention

How Virtual Reality training can help healthcare professionals retain crucial information.

Healthcare professionals are tasked with learning and retaining an enormous amount of knowledge and skills. Whether the task is to master human anatomy and physiology, the symptoms associated with a broad range of diseases and disorders, or the skills associated with performing some routine or non-routine medical procedure, healthcare professional undergo an enormous amount of training to ensure excellence when treating patients. In addition, healthcare professionals are expected to apply this knowledge and these skills under a broad range of challenging situations including time pressure, social stress, and other sub-optimal conditions.

Unfortunately, and as all healthcare professionals know first-hand, the brain is hardwired to forget. This has been known implicitly for centuries, but was formalized scientifically in 1885 when Hermann Ebbinghaus embarked on a journey to characterize and quantify the time-course of learning and memory, and in the process discovered the “forgetting curve”.

A typical forgetting curve is displayed below. The y-axis denotes the retention rate that ranges from 0 to 100%, and the x-axis denotes time. The blue dot in the upper left represents the initial level of learning. In this example, we assume that the learner…