Co-designing a Hybrid Game for Training Use of Proper Personal Protective Equipment in Different Clinical Scenarios

As highlighted by the current COVID-19 pandemic, all healthcare staff must use proper personal protective equipment in each clinical environment. This requires an understanding on the suitability of various types of equipment for different clinical scenarios, as well as knowledge on their appropriate application. Thus, learning how to use personal protective equipment in different healthcare environments is of great importance, and innovative ideas to support learning are needed. Recently, digital game-based learning has gained a lot of interest as a tool creating motivational learning for different learners. In this publication, we are presenting a hybrid game for training use of proper personal protective equipment. The player needs to select and put on suitable equipment for the clinical scenarios presented by the game. The initial game concept and the technical setup were created by following co-designing method in a multidisciplinary workshop. Subsequently, an early prototype version was introduced to nurses and nursing teachers for comments on further development ideas. According to the experts, the game concept is warmly welcomed for different user groups. The experts also provided several development ideas, which are introduced in this publication and implemented for the future versions of the game. The game is built around personal protective equipment tagged with passive UHF RFID tags and can thus be easily modified for different personal safety equipment and different clinical scenarios.