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Torch Technologies’ Advanced VIZLAB (AVL) recently delivered SIMVANA, Torch’s first commercial product, to its first university customer, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. SIMVANA is a virtual reality anesthesia trainer designed to disrupt the delivery of anesthesia training for Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist and anesthesiology residents at hospitals and universities worldwide.
The concept for SIMVANA was born by a chance meeting in 2018 between Torch employee-owner Darryl Trousdale, Torch AVL PM, and Peter Stallo of Prodigy Connect at their neighborhood swimming pool. Saving lives by leveraging advanced visualization technology quickly became the vision for this partnership, a perfect fit for the portfolio of Torch values. Over the past two and a half years, Peter and the AVL have collaborated to advance the original idea into the first software release slated to support a 12-month beta test program by a handful of universities. The initial release contains two basic teaching scenarios, but the AVL team will be adding ~30 new scenarios throughout 2021 supporting the official product launch in early 2022.
Resources to advance SIMVANA to this point were provided by a combination of internal funding and an EPIC Mega Grant. The multi-discipline team of artists, developers, and designers are creating an immersive training environment where any real-world anesthesia delivery situation can be simulated, providing training capabilities never before available. Inside SIMVANA, there are no 6 DOF models of missiles, no fire control algorithms, and no radar models, but there is a very sophisticated physiology simulator and physics-based anesthesia machine model driving every response to every action by the trainee. All of this is in a 3D immersive operating room that makes you believe that you are really there. With SIMVANA, anesthesia providers can train- not until they get it right- but until they cannot get it wrong.
For more information about SIMVANA, visit the product website at https://simvana.com
For more information about the SIUE Nurse Anesthesia program
