The Wired News covers Video Game/Entertainment Industry Technology and Medicine Conference (VEITMC ’04):
Rosser looks like a football player and cracks jokes like a comic, but his job as a top surgeon and director of the Advanced Medical Technologies Institute at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York is to find better ways to practice medicine. At the top of his list — video games.
“Traditional academic surgeons look at what I do and thumb their noses,” Rosser said at the first Video Game/Entertainment Industry Technology and Medicine Conference, sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, or TATRC, in early December.
Surgeons who play video games three hours a week have 37 percent fewer errors and accomplish tasks 27 percent faster, he says, basing his observation on results of tests using the video game Super Monkey Ball.
Video games also have much to offer the military, said Greg Mogel, a radiologist and director of the West Coast arm of TATRC, who spoke alongside Rosser at the conference held in Marina del Rey.
“You train as you fight and you fight as you train,” he said.
TATRC demonstrated a program called STATCare, a virtual simulator for combat medics that lets them bandage wounds, apply tourniquets, administer intravenous fluids, inject medications and make all of the other assessments they would be required to do in an actual battlefield.
See more at VEITMC ’04 website.
UPDATE (December 26, 2004): A software interface of STATCare can be seen in this image.