CAREER: Studying Diversity Issues with Immersive Virtual Humans

该项目的目标是调查使用虚拟人(VH)来加强医学生在患者种族/种族、性别和年龄敏感性问题上的培训。作为人际场景中的虚拟“伙伴”，本项目实施了VHS，以增强沟通技能教学的角色扮演和专家观察。研究将分三个阶段进行。首先，将进行研究，以有效地描述学生的VH互动。这包括跟踪学生的主要语言和非语言交流线索(凝视、手势、姿势、所说的话和音频)，并将它们与医学专家对学生与VH互动的编码进行关联。其次，将开发行动后回顾，以可视化跟踪的交流线索。学生和教师将能够从学生和VH的角度回顾和重播学生与VH的互动。这具有特殊的潜力，可以让表现不佳的学生替代地体验“自言自语的感觉”。事后回顾还将用于研究VH互动，了解人们如何看待VHS，并为教育工作者提供工具来识别需要补救的学生。第三，将通过分析学生与不同民族/种族、年龄和性别背景的VHS的互动来调查学生与不同患者的交流。总体而言，该系统将用于研究VH的外貌和举止是否会影响行为，并为教育工作者提供工具，以提高与不同背景的人的沟通技能。从更广泛的影响来看，这项关于虚拟人的研究有可能提高医学、护理和医生助理学生的沟通技能课程。最初，VH系统将安装在东南部的两所医学院。作为交流技能课程的一部分，学生将与虚拟人互动，学习交流和多样性的概念。随着系统的发展，医学模拟会议上的报告将详细说明如何在其他医学院复制VH系统，并将其结果集成到VH交互数据库中。先前的研究表明，大多数学生报告说，他们每周都会使用这样的系统进行练习。融入医学院课程有可能影响数以千计的卫生保健学生和教育工作者。注重与不同患者的沟通技能有可能改善对代表不足的少数群体的患者护理，以及在其他领域，如客户服务、军队和执法。

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.