News & Events
VIRTUAL EXPERIENCES RESEARCH GROUP DEVELOPS APPLICATION TO IMPROVE MEDICAL STUDENTS’ COMMUNICATION SKILLS
March 24, 2005
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Ever go to the doctor and get the sinking feeling that no one was listening to you? Maybe you sat patiently in small waiting room full of exotic looking equipment, only to be attended to by a doctor who didn't seem to be paying attention. Even worse, perhaps the resulting diagnosis didn't address the ailment and symptoms you experienced.
Dr. Benjamin Lok, team leader of the Virtual Experiences Research Group, wants to make sure that doesn't happen.
Though medical technology progresses at an amazing pace, this technology is of little use if doctors lack the communication skills needed to accurately diagnose our ailments. If our doctor is not an effective communicator, the care we receive may be no more effective than treating a broken arm with leeches.
Since April 2004, the Virtual Experiences Research Group has investigated ways to use virtual reality technology to improve doctor-patient communication, thus improving patient care and ultimately the relationship between a medical provider and its patients. The goal is to improve the process that the medical student uses to arrive at a possible diagnosis. It is the process - as opposed to the final diagnosis - that is important for medical students to learn and practice.
This research has led to the development of a virtual reality application that aims to train medical students to more effectively communicate with patients during diagnosis. The system is being designed to augment the training medical students currently receive via interaction with standardized patients.
Medical students have traditionally practiced diagnostic interactions with actors portraying patients experiencing a variety of symptoms. These actors are referred to as standardized patients.
Lok's system uses virtual patients in place of standardized patients. He posits that interaction with a virtual patient may translate into improved communication skills with real patients.
"Better communicators arrive at better diagnoses which lead to better patient health," said Lok.
The application being developed by Lok and his team uses two virtual characters, DIANA (DIgitial ANimated Avatar) the patient and VIC (Virtual Interactive Character) the expert observer, to simulate doctor-patient diagnostic interactions.
It works like this. Medical students enter a room in which life-sized projections of DIANA and VIC are displayed on a wall. Students interact with DIANA using verbal cues and body language to determine her ailment. DIANA responds to students' verbal inquiries as well as to eye contact and hand gestures. VIC lets students know how they are doing.
Initial research indicates that medical students interact with these virtual characters in much the same way they interact with standardized patients. On a realism scale of 1 to 10, medical students have rated interaction with DIANA a 7.2, while giving actual standardized patients a realism rating 7.5.
Lok has even witnessed medical students apologizing to DIANA for the pain she simulates. He admits that this "doesn't make sense" but it is an indication that the line separating the real and the virtual is blurring.
There are several benefits to using virtual characters to supplement medical student interaction with standardized patients. Many of these benefits arise from the large amounts of time and money required to train and employ standardized patients.
Virtual patients allow for a greater number of student-patient interaction experiences and increased patient diversity than traditional methods. The use of virtual patients allows for improved quality control of student-patient interactions compared to the use of standardized patients, which in turn provides for more objective measures of the student's performance.
Lok's virtual system provides students with robust feedback regarding the quality of their communication with the virtual patient. The system tracks and records the student's eye contact with DIANA and relates this information via a head gaze chart showing students exactly where they were looking throughout the interaction. VIC tells students when they have misdiagnosed DIANA and helps them to determine what they did wrong.
The system itself is cost effective and relatively simple. It is built entirely from "off-the-shelf" components - two networked PCs, a data projector, two web cameras, a tablet PC and a microphone. The total cost of the system is less than $10,000.
Once the system is further developed Lok expects that the technology will be broadly applied.
"This is not one of these elaborate science fiction set-ups that will never make it out of the research lab," said Lok. "There's great potential to have this technology in every hospital out there."
The technology being developed under Lok's leadership is the result of a partnership between several departments at the University of Florida and other educational institutions. University of Florida involvement spans the colleges of Engineering, Medicine (Dr. D. Scott Lind and Dr. Amy Stevens) and Education. Research professionals from the Medical College of Georgia and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte are also applying their expertise to this project.
Research sponsors include the Department of Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) at the University of Florida, the Medical College of Georgia and the College of Medicine Chapman Education Center. The National Institute of Health and the National Board of Medical Educators have also contributed funding to this project.
The Virtual Experiences Research Group is composed of four doctorate and four undergraduate students. Currently, there are two doctorate students, Kyle Johnsen and Andrew Raij, and one undergraduate student, Robert Dickerson, working with Dr. Lok to develop the medical diagnosis training application. Because of the opportunity for growth and development in this area, he would like to see the size of this research team double.
The Virtual Experiences Research Group recently presented their research findings at the IEEE VR 2005 conference held in Bonn, Germany, March 12 through March 16. IEEE VR 2005 is an international conference and exhibition in virtual reality technology.
More information about the work being conducted by the Virtual Experiences
Research Group is available online at http://www.cise.ufl.edu/research/vegroup/index.htm.
Source:Benjamin Lok
Writer: Danny Rigby, drigby@ufl.edu
