Evaluating Observation Skill in Nursing Education through Gaze-based Objective Assessment in Immersive Simulation

The growing elder population is putting high pressure on the field of geriatric care, however, work separation among nursing students is severe due to reality shock from the substantial discrepancy between their educational training and the practical environment. Mitigating this challenge necessitates the acquisition of proficient practical skills, with observation skills playing a crucial role, yet little is studied about the gaze behavior of geriatric care students. To tackle this issue, our research focuses on exploring the application of immersive video simulation to create a secure virtual environment and capture eye movement data for detailed analysis. In our preliminary experiment, we recruited five participants without prior nursing education and asked them to perform a detailed diagnosis of patients in VR contextual simulation, based solely on a previously provided lecture. Our results provided an objective assessment of participants' gaze behavior and its relationship with answer accuracy, where longer fixation and the proper movement to key items mentioned in the storyline results in a higher accuracy rate on the item. The data also revealed different traits that cause different patterns in the relationship between knowledge acquisition and observation skills such as the need to combine with audio information or contextual inference. Furthermore, we found some gaze patterns that characterized observation skills in a 360-degree video simulation.