CAREER: Studying Diversity Issues with Immersive Virtual Humans

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to investigate the use of virtual humans (VH) to enhance medical student training with respect to patient ethnicity/race, gender, and age sensitivity issues. As virtual "partners" in interpersonal scenarios, this project implements VHs to augment role-playing and expert-observation for communication skills instruction. Research will be conducted in three stages. First, research will be conducted to effectively characterize a student's VH interaction. This involves tracking the student's primary verbal and non-verbal communication cues (gaze, gesture, posture, words spoken, and audio frequency) and correlating them with medical expert coding of the student-VH interaction. Second, after-action reviews will be developed to visualize the tracked communication cues. Students and instructors will be able to review and replay the student-VH interaction from both the student and the VH's viewpoint. This has the special potential of allowing poor performing students to vicariously experience "what it was like to talk to themselves." The after-action reviews will also be used to study VH interactions, understand how people perceive VHs, and provide educators with tools for identifying students that require remediation. Third, student communication with diverse patients will be investigated through analyzing student interactions with VHs of varied ethnic/race, age, and gender backgrounds. Overall, the system will be used to study if the VH's appearance and demeanor impacts behavior, and provide tools for educators to enhance communication skills towards people of varied backgrounds. With respect to broader impact, this research with virtual humans has the potential to enhance the communication skills curricula of medical, nursing and physician assistant students. Initially, the VH system will be installed at two Southeast medical schools. As part of a communications skills course, students will interact with virtual humans to learn communication and diversity concepts. As the system evolves, presentations at medical simulation conferences will detail how to replicate the VH system at other medical schools and integrate their results into a database of VH interactions. Prior research has indicated that the majority of students reported that they would practice with such a system weekly. Integration into the medical school curricula has the potential to impact thousands of health care students and educators. The focus on communication skills with diverse patients has the potential to improve both patient care for under-represented minorities as well as within other domains such as customer service, the military, and law enforcement.