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Fanshawe College is getting $20 million from Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board to develop virtual reality training tools for first responders, the single largest research grant in the college’s history.
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The Centre of Excellence in Immersive Technologies Simulation for Workplace Safety at Fanshawe College, a partnership with the WSIB, will develop extended reality, or XR, programming to help prepare future emergency services workers for the high-stress scenarios they’ll encounter on the job.
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“By harnessing cutting-edge technologies, we will revolutionize how we educate, train and support those who dedicate their lives to public safety,” Fanshawe president Peter Devlin said Friday. “These tools aren’t just innovations, they’re catalysts for reimaging how students learn, how educators teach and how graduates will lead.”
Fanshawe will also be developing immersive XR and artificial intelligence (AI) tools that first responders across Ontario can use, including virtual cognitive behavioural therapy and exposure therapy.
The centre of excellence will be located in a 9,000 sq. ft. space on third floor of Fanshawe’s Innovation Village, at the college’s Oxford Street campus.
Construction and set-up of the new space will begin in early 2025, with full production expected to begin no later than April 2026, said Jeff Wright, Fanshawe’s vice-president of corporate strategy and business development.
The program will involve students and faculty from several Fanshawe programs, including the college’s public safety, health sciences, interactive media design and IT programs. The college’s business students will be involved in the eventual marketing and licensing of the XR and AI products.
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“A multidisciplinary team of faculty, students and industry professionals will collaborate with public safety practitioners and clinicians to develop, test and implement innovative training and treatment tools,” Wright said.
“The training will be delivered through XR headsets, enabling trainees to experience simulations anytime, anywhere and to repeat these scenarios, reducing the risk of harm.”
Preventing mental stress injury and building resilience among first responders is critical, WSIB president Jeff Lang said Friday.
Since 2016, the WSIB has handled more than 12,000 mental stress injury claims from first responders, Lang said. While 87 per cent of WSIB claimants with a physical injury return to work within three months, for first responders with mental stress injuries, just 40 per cent return to work within a year.
“The risk of post-traumatic stress injury in the first responder community is so high,” Lang said, adding by the time the individual makes a claim with the WSIB, their condition is often acute.
“It’s very clear that it’s harder to get a first responder safely back to work than it is in any other occupation that we deal with.”
Lang called the WSIB-Fanshawe College collaboration “an amazing partnership” that will help first responders prevent and mitigate mental stress injuries early, before it becomes a crisis that takes them off the job.
“This centre of excellence is going to change lives,” he said.
The WSIB is a no-fault workplace compensation agency for injured workers that covers more than five million people in more than 300,000 workplaces across Ontario.
The organization is moving its head offices from Toronto to the former 3M building on Tartan Drive in London in 2025.
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