Hi there,

One of my main interests in virtual worlds has been in the area of virtual patients for medical education. Our goal is to use virtual patients to teach and assess communication and clinical reasoning skills to medical, nursing, and allied health profession students. We started out using Second Life for our virtual environment and AIML as our artificial intelligence dialogue engine. We have since switched to Unity as our immersive world platform and Chatscript as our AI system.

Most of our development testing so far has been done on medical students and clinical faculty who are working on the project. I would like to get a broader sample of feedback to assess the robustness of the dialogue capabilities as well as feedback on the virtual environment itself. The system is designed to be used either as a Web interface or in an installed simulation in our Clinical Skills Center. The Web version is a chatted (typed) communication, the installed version uses spoken communication (using Dragon Naturally Speaking as our speech recognition engine) and a high quality speech generation engine for the avatar voice.

If you are interested and have some time, I would appreciate you asking this patient some questions. He is not designed for general chit chat so he won’t be able to answer very many of those types of questions. He is programmed as a patient who is being interviewed by his doctor. Also, I would welcome any general comments or suggestions on the environment itself.

Please note, all conversations are logged. You do not need to use your real name but we do record all conversations with the patient. We will use these to improve his communication abilities.

Thanks,

Doug Danforth

Here is a link to the Web Version of the patient. You may need to install a small browser plug-in from Unity.

http://go.osu.edu/VirtualPatient1

Hi Dough,

not even Ibn Sina himself was able
to argue your patient into showing him where it hurts.
This might be a problem using an avatar: )
Best

Andreas

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/best-virtual-patient-videos

Doug, do you have any YouTube demo videos available specific to your virtual patient project?

Andreas Drescher - Nov 30, 2012:

Hi Dough,

not even Ibn Sina himself was able
to argue your patient into showing him where it hurts.
This might be a problem using an avatar: )
Best

Andreas

Hi Andreas,

We have not yet programmed our patient to point or move all that much. He will respond with different facial expressions and postures depending on what questions you ask.

More developed animations will be added in version 2.0.

Doug

Hi Doug,

that sounds good,
I´m looking forward to it
and I will sent Ibn Sina to your patient 2.0 again

Best

Andreas

I had a go at the “patient”, and got some rather odd responses. Sadly, I didn’t see any way to obtain transcripts, so I’ll have to approximate the highlights here:

Me: Which portion of your back is troubling you?
Patient: No.

Me: What did you do?
Patient: I am an auto mechanic.

I asked other questions, as well, but didn’t get any unexpected responses. Considering that I’m not medically trained, I’m sure that I’m not asking questions in the correct manner, but the two examples above shouldn’t be giving those particular responses, to my way of thinking.

I found this very interesting as I am married to a doctor.

Her GP training has taught her techniques to illicit the maximum amount of clinical information for the minimum amount of chit chat. Probably THE most difficult skill.

I’ll get her to have a look later today and get some feedback from her

Dave Morton - Nov 30, 2012:

I had a go at the “patient”, and got some rather odd responses. Sadly, I didn’t see any way to obtain transcripts, so I’ll have to approximate the highlights here:

Me: Which portion of your back is troubling you?
Patient: No.

Me: What did you do?
Patient: I am an auto mechanic.

I asked other questions, as well, but didn’t get any unexpected responses. Considering that I’m not medically trained, I’m sure that I’m not asking questions in the correct manner, but the two examples above shouldn’t be giving those particular responses, to my way of thinking.

Hi Dave,

Thanks for chatting with my patient. I have looked at the transcripts and there are a number of areas that I need to work on. One of the most challenging aspects of this is keeping track of the state of the conversation. In this type of interrogation there are lots of “it” questions.

Why is that?
When did that happen?
How bad is it?
Did that help?

Since those questions can refer not only to the current issue but also to any past medical issue or family problem, it is tricky to keep all of that straight. Bruce has helped with lots of suggestions but every time I thnk I have something figured out, somebody asks questions in a sequence or in a way I didn’t anticipate.

Such are the travails of pattern matching I guess

Thanks again,

Doug

Since you’re using ChatScript, perhaps a way to help with the first question I’ve mentioned would be to create a concept called ~location (or whatever the correct syntax is - it’s been a while for me, so I forgot) that includes area, location, portion, part, or any other term that would loosely relate (quadrant comes to mind). That way, what could potentially be dozens of potential rules could be reduced to a single one.

Hi Doug,
I’d like to help as well! Personally, I’d love to test the virtual patient….
But as Chatbots.org CEO, I can help you even further. What about a home page banner for this thread? We have about 1.600 visitors a day, and most of them do you not end up on this thread, but this could really help…
Let me know if you’re interested!
Erwin

Marcus Endicott - Nov 30, 2012:

> http://www.meta-guide.com/home/about/best-of-the-best-videos/best-virtual-patient-videos

Doug, do you have any YouTube demo videos available specific to your virtual patient project?

Hi Marcus,

Unfortunately I do not. I will try to put something together in our Clinical Skills Center - that might make for some interesting video.

Doug

Erwin Van Lun - Dec 1, 2012:

Hi Doug,
I’d like to help as well! Personally, I’d love to test the virtual patient….
But as Chatbots.org CEO, I can help you even further. What about a home page banner for this thread? We have about 1.600 visitors a day, and most of them do you not end up on this thread, but this could really help…
Let me know if you’re interested!
Erwin

Hi Erwin,

This sounds interesting. What is involved in getting a home page banner?

Doug