Development of a Virtual Reality Application for Oculomotor Examination Education Based on Student-Centered Pedagogy

This work-in-progress paper describes how to utilize student-centered pedagogy to teach the concept of clinical oculomotor examination using Virtual Reality (VR) techniques. Oculomotor examination is an important bioinformatics concept which is typically taught with traditional methods such as PowerPoint slides and lab activities. Though these methods may be effective in part, there is an eventual need to provide hands-on experience to students. Providing the necessary equipment to give students the opportunity to conduct clinical oculomotor examinations can be very difficult for many institutions. The oculomotor examination equipment used in clinics by healthcare professionals is expensive, and many courses teaching this topic cannot afford the cost of clinic-level hands-on experience for students. Besides this, healthcare professional students can have different backgrounds, and their learning preferences and pace may vary. To tackle these challenges, a VR-based oculomotor examination application is developed according to student-centered pedagogy, providing a much lower-cost option for a hands-on oculomotor examination experience and offering students the freedom to walk through the oculomotor examination at different paces for personal study. In this project, a VR application is built using the Unity real-time application engine paired with the HTC Vive Pro headset's built-in accelerometer sensors and eye-tracking functions. Sample data and result images can be generated using our VR application, allowing students the opportunity to collect and analyze data directly and view how data has trended over multiple tests. Based on the results of this user study from students in the Doctor of Physical Therapy program, our proposed VR application is promising as a study tool for oculomotor examination. The results show students high preference for flexibility when using our VR app as an educational tool, and this paper also discusses the possible impacts of this in engineering and computing education.