Asynchronous teaching of psychomotor skills through VR annotations: evaluation in digital rectal examination

Many VR technology based training systems use expert's motion data as the training aid, but would not provide any short-cut to teaching medical skills that do not depend on exact motions. Earlier we presented Annotated Simulation Records (ASRs), which can be used to encapsulate experts' insight on psychomotor skills. Annotations made to behavioural parameters in training simulators enable asynchronous teaching instead of just motion training in a proactive way to the learner. We evaluated ASRs for asynchronous teaching of Digital Rectal Examination (DRE) with 3 urologists and 8 medical students. The ASRs were found more effective than motion-based training with verbal feedback.