SimX began with a small group of graduate students. In their own training, they recognized a huge problem: the manikins and standardized patients used for their simulation education felt fake, messy, and inconvenient. Not only that, but the manikins were expensive and it was rare that they fully represented what the group experienced during their clinical rounds.
There had to be a better way!
Current CEO and co-founder Ryan Ribeira was the first to recognize a way to close the gap between current medical simulation capabilities and real-life patient encounters.
Dr. Ribeira was Intrigued by the increasing number of opportunities found in Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR). He approached each member of the team with a proposition: “Let’s use this new technology to make medical simulation training cheaper, easier, and more realistic!”
This pitch took them around the nation, entering competitions with early versions of SimX as an AR program displaying a virtual manikin as an overlay on a hospital bed. While they gathered interested parties and won innovation competitions, the SimX team was continually building and improving their software. They even partnered with an AR hardware company to get the SimX system into the hands of more learners and educators.
However, the team soon hit a roadblock.
It became apparent that the available AR/MR hardware was incapable of handling what SimX wanted to achieve. While the technology was promising, it wasn’t progressing fast enough for the software that SimX was busy building.
In the early 2010s, there was a lot of uncertainty when it came to AR headsets. At the time, there wasn’t any hardware stable enough for SimX to fully adopt and integrate with their software. The team even resorted to 3-D printing their own headsets! Then, with the arrival of new headset models, Virtual Reality (VR) took off.
SimX followed closely on the heels of VR technology. Making the switch from an AR/MR company to VR was not easy. Not only did the SimX software need to be adapted, but everything from the marketing materials to the name of the company needed to change. VR technology proved to be more mature and stable and so SimX AR became simply SimX.
With advanced all-in-one headsets, our team had the chance to develop new features, including more dynamic patient encounters, NPCs, multiple patients, large trauma scenarios, and multiplayer capabilities. Every new patient encounter built for a partner was designed to be shared with other institutions. Now, SimX has the largest library of virtual patient encounters and is the most powerful healthcare simulation platform on the market. As SimX was an early adopter of VR technology, it is widely considered to be the longest-running VR medical simulation company in the world.
SimX was founded by clinicians and is still led and operated by clinicians. While much larger than its founding days, SimX is still growing and evolving as technology continues to improve and change the way we do medical training worldwide.
SimX was created because a plastic manikin lying on a table wasn’t good enough. The SimX platform can now be found around the world in classrooms, conference halls, home offices, and even living rooms. SimX is always moving forward, determined to provide medical simulation training that is more accessible, immersive, and affordable.