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Ricerca>Progetti>Edu
Nurse Project Title EDUNURSE Date September 6th, 2002 Results of the projects Video lessons freely available Participants to the Project Project manager and principal investigator Eng. Antonio Franzese Informatics Lab Faculty of Engineering "Campus Bio-Medico" University of Rome via Longoni 83 I-00155 ROMA tel. +39-06.22.54.12.60 fax +39-06.22.54.14.56 a.franzese@unicampus.it Other investigators Prof. Paola Binetti Director of Medical Education Department "Campus Bio-Medico" University of Rome via Longoni 83 I-00155 ROMA tel. +39-06.22.54.11 fax +39-06.22.54.14.56 p.binetti@unicampus.it Prof. Maria Grazia De Marinis Professor of Nursing "Campus Bio-Medico" University of Rome via Longoni 83 I-00155 ROMA tel. +39-06.22.54.11 fax +39-06.22.54.14.56 m.demarinis@unicampus.it Executive summary The formation of nurses in Italy has changed dramatically in the last years with the start of University diplomas in Nursing. The very recent transformation of diplomas into "laurea" degrees (three years for the first level and two more for the specialist one) enforces the difference between the nurses who have followed the previous vocational training and the future ones. The working nurses need therefore an update of their formation. "Campus Bio-Medico" University, the first in Italy to have a University degree in Nursing, aims to start a Continuous Medical Education program for Nurses, which will be using also the Internet as a distribution means for video based lessons. The EduNurse project is the first step to investigate the feasibility of a procedure for video recording and delivering courses via the Internet. The public outcome will be a set of procedures for building video based lessons; some of the lessons will also be freely available. There may be a connection with the national system of credits for continuous medical education which may lead to a complete offer of courses for nurses. The EduNurse project is fully coherent with the goals of HP Philanthropy: to improve the quality of education; to accelerate the process of innovation in teaching curricula; to support initiatives addressing societal needs (health/human services). The project is also aiming at the promotion of women, because most nurses in Italy are women. Timetable & Milestones
Background "Campus Bio-Medico" University of Rome is the first institution in Italy that started the Diploma for Nurses nine years ago. Following the reform of the Italian University system, now a three years Laurea degree for Nurses has been established. This situation causes a hiatus between former vocational trained nurses and newly university level colleagues. The expertise in nursing of "Campus Bio-Medico" is high and its reputation is nation-wide. The Faculty of Engineering, in coordination with the Medical Informatics Laboratory, has been investigating for some years on streaming video technologies for distance learning. Codec quality and multimedia integration (such as SMIL programming) have been addressed. The results of the long time running project MPP - Multimedia Production Process, run by ELIS in Rome (born thanks to a grant by HP), will be a starting point saving time in research and development. Activity Description Recording video lectures Video recording a lecture is not a difficult task, but it may be very expensive if TV broadcast quality is required. The need of a special set, with very good lighting and professional cameras may stop an institution starting the recording activity because of budget constraints. Being the goal of EduNurse the recording for the Internet, no special quality is required. Anyway there are some minimal requirements which must be followed in order to obtain a suitable product. There is a need for capturing moving (the speaking teacher) and still images (the slides, the blackboard, a patient, etc.). One of the first tasks will be investigating on the best practice for an effective and cheap recording, following some of the guidelines produced by the mentioned MPP project. Coding for Internet transport Video compression for Internet delivery is improving year by year. There were many different software on the market some years ago (see http://dnt.elis.org/mpp/players-comparison.htm): now RealNetworks, Microsoft and Apple are running almost 100% of the world market. With the birth of MPEG-4 the scenario may change. Philips was the first to come out with a complete offering, but other companies are on the market. The main problem seems the licensing scheme which has not been accepted by many content producers. The common opinion that MPEG-4 video codec quality is worse than Real's or Microsoft's is not the real issue. As the MPEG-4 standard does not define the encoding process, but only the decoding procedure, there is still room for improvements on quality. During the first months we'll be examining the performance of MPEG-4 new codecs, compared to Real version 9 (renamed Helix) to the coming Microsoft Windows Media 9 (now in beta version, formerly known as Corona), and to QuickTime (with the free Darwin Streaming Server) paying attention to the price/performance ratio. All these systems require specialized servers in order to optimise quality on a given bandwidth. Synchronizing video with other media Having a simple video stream is not enough for training. Related material, synchronized with the events running in the video frame, must be shown to give the nurse a better understanding of the topic. It is something similar to what happens in a classroom: the teacher shows overheads or writes on a blackboard and the student follow the talking while watching what is being shown. As they shift from the image to the teacher, they should be able to do the same on the monitor while watching the lesson through the Internet. There is a recommended W3C standard called SMIL 2.0, Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, which can be used for this purpose. RealNetworks is applying SMIL to its streaming platform, while Microsoft is partially adopting it. MPEG-4 has a more complete system which can be seen as a superset of SMIL 2.0. Our choice will be related to the work done in selecting the best codec. Indexing video content Indexing video content is maybe the most interesting and difficult part of the project. When many hours of video footage is available, the problem of accessing a specific content within a long stream is compelling. Suppose a nurse wants to learn about a topic which is surely included in a one hour lesson: she should not be compelled to go through the full hour, but she should be allowed to jump directly to the time-point where the teacher talk about it. Two approaches are possible: the full transcript of all the words pronounced by the teacher, or the identification of key points for some concepts. The first solution means an automatic speech recognition followed by a long manual check by non specially trained personnel. The second means a manual intervention by a person who understands the topics and is able to decide which are the most important. We'll study both solutions in order to give the best and yet affordable experience to the nurses who will use the system. The wireless new frontier During the EduNurse project we'll be investigating the potential of wireless connections using handheld computers. The main application seems to be the activity of the nurse at the bed side. Beside the normal use of registering drugs and other actions to the patients, we'll understand if it is possible to give video based training to a nurse during her daily work, using a handheld device. This research activity can lead to the proposal of a new project on this field. Public Domain Software The public outcome of the project will be a set of procedures for best practice in making video based lessons available over the Internet. Some video lessons will be freely available over the Internet, as a part of a complete system for distance training. | |||||||||||||||||