Products reduce nurse training costs, encourage practice, and accurately assess procedural skill.
Other benefits include less trauma to patients and reduced use of animals in medical training. In the past, simulation technology has not offered sufficient realism to mimic medical procedures, which typically have been learned through practice on cadavers, animals, and sometimes crude models, such as plastic arms. The ATP funding helped the small company to assemble the required expertise in fields such as physiology, anatomy, computer science, mechanical and electrical engineering, and art. It also enabled the design of technologies that balance realism with computational efficiency, such that three of the four products commercialized based on the ATP-funded research can run on personal computers instead of more costly graphics workstations. More than 200 of these systems have been installed in six countries so far, and HT's revenues from this product are growing at 47 percent per quarter.