Using Blender to save lives? Help needed!

I’m a British doctor involved in teaching advanced life support. I’ve also dabbled in programming (PHP, HTML5, Javascript) and have recently been playing around with Blender. I think it’d be a great tool for making a game to teach healthcare professionals (and perhaps the general public) life support skills.

My problems are lack of time and artistic talent, so I’m looking for help. I want to build a virtual resuscitation room and program a couple of scenarios to play through (and subsequently add to these if the project is successful). For now, it’ll just focus on one or two key skills - perhaps airway management and effective chest compressions.

Clearly, the clinical content needs to be completely accurate and is not amenable to change, but otherwise it’s very much open to creative input. The finished product needs to look and feel realistic but, above all, it needs to be fun. I’m hoping to find a few people in the Blender community who are up for a spare-time challenge that could make a real difference to patients’ care.

Please post back if you’re interested in getting involved and I’ll explain my ideas in more detail.

Sounds like a great project. I would love to help out, but my time is also limited. I might be interested in pitching in here and there.

I used Blender to design a GUI for a ventilator I’m working on (for my wife - personal noncommercial project). Here’s a link of it running: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfB_73DWiaE

It’s tough trying to get good graphics out of the game engine unless you’re a shader guru, but the node programming helps a lot for throwing things together quickly. Do you have a more specific scenario in terms of graphics?

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I’ve seen a pretty good amount of time wasted on such interfaces(biofeedback) and training simulations is that the hardware interface is enigmatic, since that heart rate doesn’t look like it is being fed by anything monitored from the audio jack or usb. I have a reference for the both of you. I made a python script for the libusb windows driver(open source), and used it to connect an xbox controller and use the inputs.
Now i am not a gamer so I naturally started tinkering, and my website has some interesting facts about hardware interfacing on the cheap. see my website https://sites.google.com/site/abstractind
if you don’t want to log in to google for downloading the files you’ll have to look them up on my skydrive(microsoft live) account. there’s a link to it. I also have a few, also I have a few diy suggestions on how an artificial heart in a dummy can supply biofeedback to get a accurate representation of a defibrelation sequence.

you want to make a continuous waveform?

use math.sin etc and objects worldposition,

you can emit a stream of items from a moving emitter

to leave a moving waveform,
check this out

I have an uncle who collects electro-defyb/recussitation devices and I’m told by him that the early device’s are not timed to cardio rhythms and can cause midocardial something or others, and I think this is a great project for creating a course or devices to represent pulminary problems like this. (pant).