DEVELOPMENT OF WEB ACCESSIBLE MEDICAL EDUCATIONAL SIMULATORS

One of our main goals is to incorporate the usage of computers into the process of education. The great part of our e-learning activities lies in the development of applications that would demonstrate non-trivial physiological systems behavior, their dynamics and regulation. Students of medicine generally differ from students of engineering and technical universities; being less used to purely abstract mathematical thinking. Therefore it is necessary to transfer the mathematically expressed pathophysiological concepts into more schematic, easily understandable, yet still precise manner. Best results are achieved, when the students find the form familiar, e.g. similar to illustrations from the textbooks. In the process of the development of e-learning simulators, our main focus is creating the model and creating high quality animations to visualize the simulation results. In this paper, we describe our approach to usage of simulators in e-learning, the development of these applications, their layered architecture and technologies we use. We use the Matlab Simulink for creating physiological models, .NET framework or Control Web as the main platforms and Adobe Flash for controllable animations. We describe our original tools for accessing Simulink models from the .NET framework or Control Web and we introduce our approach to maintaining the simulator state based on statecharts.