Faculty Scholars

About

Sab Babu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Clemson University. Sab received his PhD degree in Information Sciences in 2007 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He also received a BS in Microbiology in 2000 and an MS in Informatics in 2002 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Prior to arriving at Clemson University, Sab was a Post-Doctoral fellow and a Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa from 2007 to 2010. Sab co-directs the virtual environments research group in the School of Computing at Clemson University. Broadly, Sab’s research interests are in Virtual Reality and 3D Human-Computer Interaction. Specifically, Sab has been conducting research more recently in the areas of Medical Virtual Reality for Training and Education, Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, and Virtual Reality in STEM and Computational Thinking K-12 education. He has over 60 publications in peer-reviewed conferences and journals such as the IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, and the IEEE Transactions on Applied Perception. Sab was the general chair of the premiere academic conference in virtual reality IEEE Virtual Reality 2016, and is program chair of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference 2017. Sab has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Labor, Medline Foundation and St. Francis Hospital Foundations. Sab and his students have created interactive virtual reality simulations for teaching the CDC 5 moments of hand hygiene, training users in recognizing the signs and symptoms of patient deterioration and patient monitoring and safety. He is always looking for expanding his research in clinical applications of virtual reality.

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How their research is transforming health care

Sab also served as a Co-PI on a medical virtual reality grant called Nursing Surveillance Training using Interactive Virtual Simulation, together with Dr. Tracy Fasolino in the School of Nursing, awarded by the Medline Foundation that ended in December 2014. The total award amount from Medline was $99,981 and it has funded graduate students to work in simulation-based education of patient safety, surveillance and monitoring procedures. Sab has also been very involved in training nursing students with simulated virtual patients in critical situations and failure-to-rescue scenarios that was initiated three years ago with a seed grant from the St. Francis Hospital Foundation ($50,000). The funding has enabled them to complete the development of the complex patient surveillance training simulation to educate nurse practitioners in identifying the signs and symptoms of rapid deterioration, and they have just completed a longitudinal study examining the impact of simulation based training of nurse practitioners at the St. Francis Hospital. Sab has written papers examining visual perceptual behaviors with and without way-finding aids in simulated hospital environments, and evaluating the effect of virtual human animation on emotion contagion in interactive medical simulations that have been published in the Joint ICAT EuroGraphics conference as well as the IEEE Virtual Reality 2014 conference. A journal paper based on the IEEE VR 2014 paper entitled “Effects of Virtual Human Animation on Emotion Contagion in Simulated Inter-Personal Experiences” has also been published in the prestigious journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE TVCG) in April 2014. A paper empirically evaluating the preference of various interaction metaphors on nursing students in simulated patient monitoring and surveillance activities towards education in responding to critical situations with patients won the Best Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (IEEE ICHI) 2013.

Health Research Expertise Keywords

Faculty Scholar, Simulation Based Training and Education, Medical Virtual Reality, Inter-personal Skills Training, Team Work Training, Healthcare Critical Situations Training