HAL, Gillette College's AI manikin, makes the difference for nursing students

GILLETTE — Wednesday morning, shortly before her students arrived for their assessment, Gwen Reed pulled the plug on her students’ patient.

This patient can talk and respond to sight, sound and touch — but it isn’t quite human.

It’s HAL — or Tret Hall, as it was known in its most recent simulation — and for nursing students, he makes all the difference, Reed said.

HAL, a 5-foot-9 medical manikin equipped with artificial intelligence integration, was introduced to Gillette College nursing faculty and students about two years ago. It stands out from the rest of the college’s manikins.

HAL can go by different names, recall a story, tell nurses a date of birth and a pain level — sometimes.

“He’s good most of the time,” instructor Cheri Topping said. “We’ve had to argue with him about his pain level before.”

Wednesday, HAL was made to be a burn victim. It had attachments that looked like deep third- and second-degree burns along its arms and torso, along with a superficial first-degree burn on its face that looked like HAL had forgotten to apply sunscreen.

Tret, as HAL would be called in the simulation, is in bad shape. Reed and Topping had given him a back story.

Topping asked the manikin for its name, date of birth. There was a pause as the sound of an oxygenator hissed in the room. Then the manikin responded in an automated voice, saying it was an 18-year-old man named Tret Hall.

Topping was careful to enunciate each syllable when talking to the machine.

“How did you get hurt, Tret?” Topping said.

“I was in a cooking accident,” Hall said.

“I don’t think you were,” Topping replied. “I think you were experimenting with bombs.”

“I understand your concern,” the manikin was indignant. “But I was injured while cooking.”

Topping chuckled and said that HAL gets confused sometimes.

She and Reed told the manikin to tell students that he was experimenting with bombs before being blown up and crashing against a wall. This time, Topping said, it forgot what happened and might have a case of amnesia.

She and Reed then left HAL, lying in a hospital, and went into another room and watched through a one-way mirror and a monitor as their students interacted with the manikin.

The nursing students introduced themselves to their inanimate patient, and Topping — through a microphone meant to simulate a patient speaking — told them how it got injured.

They asked the manikin if it can lift its arms, and after a pause, its right arm raised to a 90-degree angle.

“I didn’t know he could do that,” one wide-eyed student said.

Students looked at the soot around HAL’s lips, torn clothes and the attachments of burned skin around its arms and torso. They calculated how much of its body is burned and the patient’s corresponding medicine regimen.

HAL also had a large laceration on its back from the blast that’s meant to add another test to the simulation, and after hearing its injury story, the students made note of that injury too.

The group of nursing students made it through the simulation, but got tripped up by a few things, which is to be expected, Reed said. They did OK, she and Topping said.

“It’s better they kill a manikin than an actual patient,” Reed said.

She continued by saying that HAL is one of the main aspects that makes Gillette College’s nursing program so thorough.

The small class sizes and the burn simulation demonstrated for her complex care students make it so each student gets specialized attention, and some are ready to care for patients in emergencies.

Reed said one previous student told her about a time while sitting in an airport, a person had started to have a seizure. While EMS was on the way, the student helped the person to the ground and told EMS everything that happened.

“She said they had never gotten a report like that,” Reed recalled. “These are the stories that make you proud.”

Nursing students in complex care are assessed in three different simulations with HAL, including burns, cardiac arrest and atrial fibrillation patients.

Reed said she prioritizes making Gillette College students an example to other programs in the area. She said she’s heard remarks about the college’s students being remarkably safe, professional with an ability to think quickly and clinically.

The rehearsals with HAL are all part of that, she said.

“Once they’ve done it with him,” she said, “it’s like they’ve done it 100 times.”

This story was published on March 31, 2026.