September 21, 2015By Lance Baily

Free Vital Sign Simulator App Continues to Be Improved

vital sign simulator simwars remote

Back in 2013 we first shared about the Free Vital Sign Simulator from Florian Schwander (read that article here). Recently Jason Bowman at the ‘The Resuscitationist’ blog used the updated Vital Sign Simulator software to provide a long-distance SimWars competition.

Excerpt from Jason’s Use of Vital Sign Simulator:


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Recently I was given the task of teaching an interactive EKG and ACLS review for our Emergency Medicine Interest Group. We wanted to make it entertaining so we planned a sort of mini simwars style event. I taught medic school and ACLS for some time so this should’ve been an easy topic. Bring in a rhythm generator, defibrillator and a cpr manakin and we should be good to go right? The only problem was that the Texas A&M College of Medicine consists of multiple remote campuses. This has made teaching skills labs like this difficult. So my first thought was to rig up a camera to broadcast my defibrillator screen and do it that way. But then I wouldn’t be able to introduce 12 lead’s or any other vitals without switching back to a different source. Plus, I didn’t have a camera like that anyways. The other option was to program everything into a powerpoint presentation. The problems with this is that not only is it a ton of work, it’s hard to control the information you’re providing as they ask for it. You always end up inadvertently leading the scenario with your slides rather than letting the students run it. The perfect solution would be to have some way to broadcast an ICU monitor display that you can control the numbers on. Enter the Vital Sign Simulator.



Vital Sign Simulator is a freeware program I came across on sourceforge.com that does exactly that. It’s designed for use in a dual monitor setup which just so happens to work perfectly for presentations and video conferences. VSS allows you control of the EKG rhythm, HR, RR, SPO2, and BP. It has most of the same controls as any good rhythm generator in that you can select the next rhythm after a shock, ignore a shock and it supports pacing as well. It’s designed to let you control it on one screen while projecting it onto your second screen. There are buttons on this screen for shocking, pacing and such. That is because this program is actually designed to run on a computer with two mice and keyboards so the students can control their own screen. We didn’t use it this way but if you want to that’s what it was made for. It even has a couple fun buttons on the operator screen like groan and vomit that made for some extra entertainment during the event! Another cool feature was the timer and timestamp feature. We didn’t end up using it the other night but it would definitely come in handy for a legitimate competition or serious training where seeing time to procedure might be helpful in comparing performance. All in all this was a pretty well featured and well designed little program for some freeware!

About Vital Sign Simulator

The vital sign simulator is intended for use in medical emergency training simulations. In combination with a (cheap) cpr-manikin, it offers a low-cost alternative to commercial high-tech patient simulation manikins. It is used with a dual monitor system, one monitor with controls for the operator and one providing the vital signs to the trainees. Heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, blood pressure and various moving ecg-samples can be set and changed at any time by the operator. The trainee-side interface allows automatic/manual defibrillation, cardioversion and pacing.


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You can download Vital Sign Simulator here and read more about its use in long distance SimWars here.


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