• Spreading information about health and prevention, mainly regarding cancer, sex education, alcohol and substance abuse, smoking, and women’s health
• Reaching the public’s attention directly, using an understandable language and friendly but effective communication
• Organizing conventions for professionals, for patients and for making these two categories meet.

The project is structured in five main micro-projects:

HEALTHY – The Health and Wellness Center

A virtual building divided in several floors, each one dedicated to a medical area. In this building leaflets, brochures and informatonal posters are distributed to the Second Life users; informative videos (machinima) are streamed all day long; events are organized to promote new medical products and real health conventions; virtual sessions are created to give the users the opportunity to virtually meet doctors and experts, with in-world Q&A sessions.

Virtual Oncological Department of Policlinico di Modena

This is the virtual re-creation of the real Oncological Department of Policlinico di Modena, a reference point for cancer research and care in Italy. It hosts events and information points.

Virtual Cancer Institute

An oncological institute dedicated to information and learning in Second Life. Here, doctors and other members of the health sector can meet and interact with citizens from all over the world, in real time and cost-free. Its launch ran parallel to the real international event “Meet the professor - Advanced course on breast cancer, Modena, 5-6-7 November 2008”, that was broadcasted live in the Virtual Cancer Institute. The virtual Institute also offered, at the end of every conference day, an exclusive Q&A virtual session: two renowned professors logged in to Second Life, together with the audience, answering live questions regarding the conference themes.

Machinima

Several machinima videos were produced, using existing spaces as the set and avatars of the Community as actors, dubbed by professional actors. These videos are published on the Intermedia websites and streamed in the virtual spaces. They are one-off productions or short series, covering topics related to health prevention and information.

The activities of the Health Center are promoted in-world, by the Italian community towards the global community, but also in the real world, through a marketing campaign consisting of press releases, newsletters sent to mailing lists of user contacts and professional contacts, creation of a group and related communication in Facebook.

Facebook Campaign

A group in Facebook dedicated to cancer awareness was created, in which facebook users could come together to discuss common topics and interact with experts for Q&A.  The facebook group also contained the machinima short fictions that promoted cancer awareness, as well as links to the Second Life Health center.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

The Virtual Medical Center represents an accurate reconstruction in Second Life of a real counterpart. Both design and building have been based on topographical and planimetrical detailed data, in order to grant the maximum visual fidelity and to train medical staff to the real environments in which they will operate. The main building has been structured into different rooms, each dedicated to a specific phase of the medical path, starting from transfer room, to the post-operating room, with interactive and dynamic items.

The main focus of this virtual space is training medical and para-medical stuff to identify clinical risks through operating path of a patient. Users navigate through virtual environments using an integrated software (HUD), which provides them with informations, questions, and feedbacks to evaluate the results of proper/unproper interactions and chooses in real-time. Training path has been planned to put users in front of the most important critical spots in a medical environment, such as negliction of normatives, and failures coming from excessive self-confidence and lack of attention.

Results associated with each phase are stored locally and then send to a remote web-server, at the end of testing sessions, to be analyzed and evaluated. All interactions have been designed to be subtle to other users playing around, in order to grant execution of multiple sessions in parallel.

PROJECT ROI:

A virtual environment provides an immersive context, in which users participate and navigate spaces through a virtual counterpart, the avatar. This entity can play training/learning sessions maximizing his experiencial benefits.

Project ROI is basically the reduction of risk factors which may eventually cause damage to a patient during his hospitalization, and the possibility to give users an error imprinting without exposing themselves and/or other entities to risks for their health. This aspect has immediate and important economical benefits on national health service. Training feedbacks are remotely stored, thus providing a useful base of data which may eventually been used to improve structures design, furnitures displacement in order to minimize human error chances.

The entire project has been developed to be compliant to recommendations provided by Italian National Health Service, and to Universal Protocol by Joint Commission.