May 30, 2015 3 min read

WAYNESBURG – A robotic manikin that blinks, bleeds and even sweats is giving Waynesburg University nursing students an interactive lesson on how to treat hospital patients in the real world.

The SimMan 3G manikin was delivered in April to the nursing school and is a major upgrade from the “medium-fidelity manikins” students have been using since 2008, said Melanie Rush, a nursing instructor and lab coordinator at the university.

“We’ve been pushing for him because he’s a much more interactive manikin with movement,” she said. “He blinks his eyes, his pupils dilate to light. The other manikins stare blankly at you, so sometimes it’s hard for the students to buy into that.”

The manikin, which is gender neutral, can have facial expressions depending on treatment. It also can sweat, froth at the mouth, have nose bleeds and seizures in an attempt to give students an accurate representation in the simulated hospital lab.

It also can be filled with fluid to simulate bleeding from wounds that need pressure. Real-time feedback is offered to students who are learning how to perform cardiac pulmonary resuscitation so they can master the technique, Rush said.

“If a student isn’t giving the right medicine, or giving it at the wrong time, he would react as a patient would react,” Rush said of the 65 features the simulator offers. “He’s pretty fancy.”

Rush said the new technology, which adds to several medium-level manikins and one high-level version, helps the students during their sophomore and junior years before they typically work in clinical setting as seniors. She said simulated settings are helping the university’s 160 nursing students and better preparing them when they treat real patients at area hospitals.

“One-on-one patient care is important,” she said. “The faculty plays roles (in simulated settings), but we’re not getting stuck with needles.”

In working with area hospitals, the school’s instructors search for certain patients the students can treat, although they might not have the same ailments that are being taught at the time in the classroom. The SimMan allows them to target specific treatments to coincide with the curriculum, Rush said.

The Greene County Memorial Hospital Foundation helped to pay for a portion of the SimMan’s $115,000 price tag, Rush said. The university’s nursing school was able to use the manikin briefly at the end of last semester, but will utilize the technology more frequently when classes resume in the fall, Rush said.

“The challenging thing to bring to a simulation is that one-on-one interaction,” she said. “This is as a viable as the real thing.”