Assessing Engagement during Rescue Operation Simulated in Virtual Reality: A Psychophysiological Study

ABSTRACT

The goal of this study was to investigate the patterns of engagement among professional firefighters during a rescue operation challenge simulated in a virtual reality (VR). The simulator offers a training that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult to arrange in the real world, here a mass-casualty incident. We measured engagement with cardiovascular reactivity as well as subjective perceptions of workload. We found that both a VR rescue challenge and a VR control condition lead to engagement evident in the decrease in parasympathetic activation from baseline (measured as high-frequency heart rate variability). However, the rescue operation leads to a stronger increase in sympathetic activity (shorter pre-ejection period and RZ-interval) than the control condition. Furthermore, the subjective workload ratings corroborate the results from the objective engagement indices. These results demonstrate that it is possible to create a virtual environment that elicits engagement among professional rescuers.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Natalia Dużmańska, Natalia Lipp, Krzysztof Rębilas, and Radosław Sterna for their work on data collection and pre-processing.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

The funding body did not interfere with the design of a study, data collection, analysis or interpretation of a data, nor in the decision of publishing the paper or choosing the journal.

First three authors of the manuscript, Gabriela Czarnek, Paweł Strojny, and Agnieszka Strojny, were employed at Nano Games which developed the simulator being tested.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2019.1655905.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/mja7p.

Notes

1. Available at http://www.straz.gov.pl/english/national_firefighting_rescue_system.

2. In the current study, we measured affect, emotion, stress and several dimensions of task perception. These measures, as not of a vital importance for the current manuscript, are presented in the Supplemental material section.

3. An introduction to this statistical analysis strategy can be found in the books by Field (2013; especially chapters 11 and 14) and Field, Miles, and Field (2012; especially chapter 10 and 13).

Additional information

Funding

This work was co-financed by European Union Funds under the Smart Growth Operational Programme, sub-measure 1.1.1. Industrial research and development work and Nano Games sp. z o.o. (name of the project “Widespread Disaster Simulator research and preparation for implementation”).

Notes on contributors

Gabriela Czarnek

Gabriela Czarnek is a social psychologist with an interest in effort mobilization in applied settings; she is a researcher at Nano Games and at the Institute of Psychology of Jagiellonian University.

Paweł Strojny

Paweł Strojny is a social psychologist interested in motivation toward virtual experiences; He is head of R&D at Nano Games and assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Psychology of Jagiellonian University.

Agnieszka Strojny

Agnieszka Strojny is a social psychologist with an interest in video games engagement and learning effectiveness in VR simulators; She is a researcher at Nano Games and assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Psychology of Jagiellonian University.

Michael Richter

Michael Richter is a psychophysiologist with an interest in the determinants and consequences of mental and physical effort; He is a Reader in Motivation Psychology at the School of Natural Sciences and Psychology of Liverpool John Moores University.