Glenn Platt, the director of Miami’s Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies, helped lead the effort, at the request of Johns Hopkins Medicine. The Web-training program is available via both the Centers for Disease Control website and iTunes University. The program trains health care providers in three critical areas: proper donning of personal protective equipment, the safe removal of gear and active monitoring skills.
“The guidelines are 10-15 pages of written text. But if you want doctors and nurses to best understand how to put on and take off this equipment to keep from getting infected, the visual learning was pretty critical to it,” Platt said.
Within the span of little more than a week, the team completed the training, complete with multiple web pages and how-to videos that show the medical professionals exactly how to protect themselves.
“It then can go out globally and be used anywhere in the world to help doctors and nurses better understand the proper ways to prevent themselves from becoming infected. Our role at Miami was to lead the technology team,” said Platt.
Students also contributed to the effort, including senior Stuart Yamartino of Massachusetts, who helped write the code for the websites while interning in San Francisco. That involved creating more than 200 web pages. Yamartino majors in interactive media studies and is a web developer.
“Anytime I wasn’t interning, I was working on this. I would get home at 7 and work on this until 3 a.m. One of the days I took off so I could work all day on this,” he said.
For both teacher and student, the work was more than gratifying when all was said and done.
“It’s been tremendously exciting. I love my job and I feel like I make a difference every day. It’s rare that I get to make a difference in such a direct way. … To have myself and my students involved in something I’m very sure saves lives,” Platt said.
Yamartino said, “It’s an amazing feeling seeing doctors on the news that were getting sick from Ebola and knowing that we will hopefully not see any more doctors on the news because of the systems we were building … it’s exciting to know this will be saving lives, especially doctors’ lives.”
©2014 the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio). Distributed by MCT Information Services.
