March 23, 2021By Lance Baily

Personal Experience Inspires Development of Neonatal Patient Simulator, NENASim

Medical-X, a company that specializes in the design, development, manufacturing, marketing and distribution of health care simulation products for teaching and training, recognizes the importance of high-fidelity simulation. To help offer an innovative solution to improve patient safety among infants, the company developed a realistic interactive simulator to be used for various training scenarios: the NENASim. While this health care simulation manikin offers ideal training solutions for a wide range of health care professionals, NENASim is ultimately the result of a personal experience Medical-X CEO Dervis Demirtas had with his then-5-month-old son. Today, he reveals the details of the scenario that motivated him to create this clinical simulation resource.

“When my son, Dildar, was only five months old, he got the wrong medication at home. The medication was so strong that all parts of his muscles became stiff on the spot. When I got home, I found my son motionless on the ground. I called an ambulance and I paged my sister, who is also a doctor, for help.

She gathered a team of researchers abroad from the other side of the globe, US, Japan, to look into my son’s case mainly because the medication that was given to my son has never been given before to a child younger than 1 year old, so there was no information available on what to do in such situations. This team was able to come up eventually with a solution. They gave my son a different medication and he got better.


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The process is what impressed me the most. When the ambulance came, the paramedics were completely shocked; they were almost in tears because they had never seen a case like that before. My son was bent, eyes wide open and stiff as a statue. It was a scary situation to say the least.

When we got to the emergency room, there was a group of doctors around us who were trying to check his vital signs, measure the blood pressure, etc. My sister was taking charge of the situation, and I could tell from the look of the other doctors surrounding her that they were also shocked and reluctant to make any decision as they were afraid to make a wrong call with irreversible consequences. My sister, having taken the lead, made these decisions really fast, and thanks to that they were able to save my son.

I was there as a father but also as an observer. Being an expert in health care simulation for the purpose of training physicians, thoughts raced at the back of my mind. I thought, ‘If this happened to someone else’s child, what would be the odds of their survival? They probably wouldn’t survive.’

In situations like this, every second counts. No one was willing to take the risk because every decision they make is life or death. It only takes one poor decision to put a child’s life at stake. No one was ready to take that responsibility.


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Eventually I found myself thinking, ‘How can we help prepare health care personnel for such encounters?’ I got curious to check the solutions that were available on the market to help prepare medical providers for different patient care environments. The health care simulation manikins I came across looked more like dolls and didn’t convey a realistic simulation of how a patient would be.

Then I thought, ‘If you train with this type of simulation manikins, the training experience of the doctors will not be as challenging nor immersive as the experience they would have with a real baby.’

This is how the journey of Medical-X started. We strived to build a realistic patient simulator with all the necessary features to train and prepare doctors beforehand for all possible situations, so they are able to handle even the rarest cases, such as the case with my son, which didn’t happen back then before anywhere else in the world. That’s how I got started with the design of NENASim, our realistic neonatal patient simulator.”

More About NENASim

NENASim was devised to complement realistic multidisciplinary team and/or individual baby patient simulation training. From the manikin’s lifelike eyes and palpable fontanelles to the realistic silicone skin that is colorized to simulate conditions like cyanosis, jaundice, paleness and redness, the NENASim Xtreme looks, feels, weighs and sounds like a real baby. NENASim offers an ideal training solution for a wide range of health care professionals, including but not limited to patient care, emergency medical intervention and resuscitation training for dynamic team or individual training. NENASim Infant is also available in various degrees of fidelity.



“NENASim is the closest you can get to training with a real baby,” said Dr. Irwin K.M. Reiss, a professor at Erasmus University Medical Center within the University Medical Center Rotterdam.

More About Medical-X

Medical-X is a Dutch company based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, that specializes in the production of high-fidelity simulation products, medical training manikins and full-flight simulators. Since foundation, Medical-X has developed new state-of-the-art simulators with realistic looks and functionalities. To provide such quality simulated training solutions in various medical fields, Medical-X incorporates cutting edge technology with the professional input of expert physicians.

Always seeking to improve production efficiency, Medical-X opened a new factory in Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 2017. This decision was made in hopes that production times could be shortened by completing manufacturing (from silicone casting to soldering and assembling) largely in-house. This paved the way for strict quality control, allowing the company to meet set standards.

Today, these simulators can be used in medical schools, universities, hospitals, and skills centers. From Jackson college in Mississippi to Erasmus MC skill center in the Netherlands to the Veterinary clinic De Ark in Belgium and Colegio Medico del Peru in Lima, Peru, Medical-X is bringing health care simulation technologies to learners across the world.

Learn More About NENASim Infant Xtreme


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