john-norris.net

If you are interested in healthcare in Second Life, here are a few tips to get you going:

I’m taking snapshots in Second Life of various medical venues. I think it is a quick way to get an overview of the variety that is out there, without actually logging into Second Life: www.sluniverse.com/pics/Default.aspx?Name=Knoh+Oh

The main mailing list for folks that are really involved in SL Medical stuff: lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/healthcare

There’s a nice wiki being put together at SLHealthy: slhealthy.wetpaint.com

If you are in-world (within Second Life) you would do well to check out these areas:

• Sexual Health Sim
• Virtual Hallucinations
• The Virtual Neurological Education Centre
• SL Medical Library and Health Info Island
  

There are many more places to go, and things change so much in Second Life I hesitate even linking to these…but I know how it helps to have a bit of direction.

Finally, the reason I went into Second Life in the first place was to check out support groups for a medical informatics class I was taking. I found this BBC produced video about Support for Healing Island and that is what convinced me to give the whole thing a try.

I am doing a bit of research on diabetes education and wanted to quickly check in with some folks about their experiences. This isn’t what the research is about, but I thought they could offer a few pointers of what to look for.

My first thought was Second Life, so I went in-world. There was no sim that I could find where folks with this issue would be hanging out, although I did find the SL Diabetes Support group’s info pretty easily. I also stumbled upon some informational posters set up on Health Info Island. They were pretty simple, tho nicely done, and had info on the support group. However, I ended up not finding anyone that I could chat to live.

So back to the web, a bit of searching and I find Diabetic-Talk. I end up getting a lot of live help on good ol’ IRC.

Why? I’m guessing that IRC has been around for a long time, doesn’t take much PC resources, has a brief (but can be somewhat stiff) learning curve, simple/free to set up on a server, and just works. I’m guessing that in the future we’ll find this to be true in the virtual worlds, but not quite yet.