SeGTE: A serious game to train and evaluate basic life support

Basic life support (BLS) is the level of medical care which is used for victims of life-threatening illnesses or injuries until they can be given full medical care at a hospital. It can be provided by trained medical personnel, including emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and by laypersons who have received BLS training. BLS is generally used in the pre-hospital setting, and can be provided without medical equipment. The ability to respond to an emergency situation can be the difference between life and death. Acknowledging this fact has made decision-makers, governments and Non Government Organizations (NGO) to make a priority to spread this knowledge and skills to the general population. Currently, BLS is taught in a standard course provided by the Red Course or certified entities, where the pedagogical content given to the students is a mix of theoretical and practical training where life-size mannequin are used. In this paper we argue that serious games could help spread this knowledge through the general population and it could also be used to refresh the knowledge of people that have been certified in BLS in the past. In order to test this hypothesis we have developed the SeGTE game and performed an evaluation of its effectiveness on conveying such pedagogical content.