Open Cardiac Massage Simulator

Created 9/16/2021, Updated 6/14/2023

CSSALT worked with colleagues from the UF Departments of Anesthesiology and Surgery to design and build a task trainer for practicing open chest cardiac massage.

On rare occasions, open cardiac massage may be performed in the Intensive Care Unit on patients who have recently had a sternotomy and are in cardiac arrest. Since open cardiac massage is not a commonly performed procedure, intensivists and ICU staff may be hesitant to perform it and are potentially unfamiliar with the necessary or available equipment. There is a scarcity and high cost associated with using cadavers for training and practice.

Therefore, we designed and built a low-cost, easy-to-produce, and sufficiently realistic simulation task trainer. This new open cardiac massage simulator provides quantitative feedback and a low cost of training.