Enhancing Difficult Airway Management Training: The Role of Virtual Reality and Adaptive Learning

Emergency physicians play a central role in healthcare. They often must make quick and accurate decisions to save patients' lives. Among the critical procedures they have to master is difficult airway management (DAM), a procedure required to establish and maintain a patient's airway for adequate ventilation and oxygenation. To ensure optimal proficiency in DAM, the clinical skills that comprise this procedure must be regularly practiced and updated. However, traditional training approaches present significant organizational challenges in terms of time and cost. In response to these issues, we have developed an innovative education and training application employing immersive Virtual Reality (VR) for teaching basic to advanced DAM procedures, supported by an Adaptive Learning system. To evaluate the effectiveness of our DAM training system, we conducted experiments with a control group trained using traditional methods and two VR subgroups, one with and one without the Adaptive Learning component. Our results show that simulating the DAM procedure in VR is effective in improving students' knowledge and produces comparable learning outcomes to traditional teaching methods. Interestingly, our study did not provide conclusive evidence that the adaptive design was superior to the non-adaptive one in terms of knowledge and acquisition of skills. However, it demonstrated greater efficiency, particularly in reducing training time.