Design and Development of a Serious Game for Central Line Placement Prabal Khanal, ME 1 , Daniel Katz, MD 2 , Samual DeMaria, MD 2 , Marina Krol, PhD 2 , Kanav Kahol, PhD 1 1 Arizona State University, AZ, 2 Mount Sinai Medical Center, NY E-mail:prabalkhanal@gmail.com, dkatz621@gmail.com, Samuel.Demaria@mountsinai.org, marina.krol@mountsinai.org, Kanav.Kahol@asu.edu Abstract Serious games are gaining popularity in being used for training purposes in various fields. They were first used for training various medical and military procedures. At present, there are several platforms available for developing serious games. In this paper, we present a serious game designed using a gaming engine called Unreal Engine, which facilitates the development of serious games for PCs as well as mobile iOS devices. The serious game that is presented in this paper is designed to provide training for the aseptic method for Central Venous Catheter (CVC), also known as central line, placement procedure. The pilot study was performed with first year residents from the department of anesthesiology at Mount Sinai Medical Center, NY and the residents claimed they felt it aided them in their line placements. 1. Introduction A serious game is a type of video game, played with some specific rules, that focuses on providing training on education, health, public policy, and strategic communication [1]. Serious games facilitate learning in an immersive environment. Such environment is capable of setting clear goals for individual users and requires users to make frequent and important decisions throughout the training sessions [2]. Serious games were initially designed for aviation to train pilots under different circumstances. The approach of simulation based aviation training was later adopted by various other industries; most notable is healthcare education. In recent years, different platforms have emerged for the development of highly immersive serious games: virtual worlds such as Second Life; and, gaming engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity. In this paper we present a serious game for central line or central venous catheter (CVC) placement procedure designed using Unreal Development Kit (UDK). Annually five million CVCs are placed [3] and approximately 5% to 26% of them lead to complications [4]. Failure to follow the aseptic techniques properly during placement is one of the causes for the complications. The major focus of the game is to train residents on the aseptic method of CVC placement to help reduce the complication that might arise during the procedure. The major contributions of this study are: • We have designed and developed a serious game for CVC procedure training using UDK. • It can be played in both Windows® and iOS® platforms and can provide real-time feedback to users during practice sessions. • It stores necessary information from the training/testing sessions in a remote database server to be later used for objective evaluation, summative feedback, and performance tracking. 2. Methodology In this section, we present the design architecture of the system. The conceptual design of the CVC training simulator is presented in Figure 1. 2.1. CVC Game Development The CVC game design consists of four major components: Game Interface, Database, CVC Algorithm & Scoring, and web-portal for registration and performance tracking. 2.1.1. Game Interface. The graphical user interface (GUI) of the simulator is designed using Unreal Development Kit (UDK). UDK is a game development toolset that is based on Unreal Engine 3. Complex graphical objects were first designed using MAYA® and then imported into UDK environment. The game environment, as shown in Figure (2), consists of heads- up display (HUD) and the gaming window. The top HUD is placed in order to provide formative (real- time) feedback to the users. 978-1-4799-1053-3/13/$31.00 c 2013 IEEE 530 CBMS 2013