Modeling Professional Attitudes and Teaching Humanistic Communication in VR

描述(申请人提供)：在VR(MPathic-VR)中塑造专业态度和教授人文沟通(MPathic-VR)患有危及生命的癌症患者需要护理者，他们能够通过理解他们的兴趣、价值观和信仰来帮助他们做出艰难的决定，并与患者的家人和朋友进行同理心的交流，并有效地与他们的医疗同行进行沟通。然而，医学生、住院医生，甚至肿瘤学研究员都缺乏在如此关键的沟通方面的有效培训。在传统的“粉笔和谈话”教学环境中，教育工作者很难向医学生传授道德和职业价值观。标准化患者指导员(SPI)也被用来评估专业能力，但它们可能耗时、昂贵，并且在多次学生接触时表现不一致。最后，医学生本身普遍抵制旨在促进道德实践和反思专业精神的教育措施，因为他们缺乏经验，无法认识到为什么明确的专业教育很重要。在第一阶段，MCI成功地开发和测试了MPathic-VR，这是一个原型虚拟患者教育系统，旨在解决当前医学教育模式中的弱点。在这个第二阶段的项目中，MCI计划极大地提高第一阶段系统的教育广度和技术复杂性。在第二阶段完成后，这一平台将以丰富和连贯的与癌症背景下的沟通相关的教育经验为特色，并将在两所医学院的课程中进行混合方法试验，以检验其有效性。该项目有五个目标。(1)将第一阶段的“突发坏消息”设计扩展为更全面的培训体验，以满足医学研究生教育认证委员会(ACGME)的额外核心能力。(2)开发一个角色动画创作框架，以支持快速创建高表现力的虚拟人角色。(3)开发捕捉学习者非语言行为的能力，以在VHS和学习者之间建立自然的、类似人类的(即，双向和多模式)互动。(4)使用自动化方法标记每个学习者与VH互动中发生的“可教时刻”，并为学习者提供有效/无效交流的总结性反馈。(5)在两所医学院各设一支对照和一支干预臂的双臂混合方法试验中，展示MPathic-VR教育计划的有效性。总而言之，MPathic-VR项目将把关于专业精神、同理心、团队合作和以患者为中心的课程置于一个既具有高度吸引力又具有坚实教学基础的背景中。第二阶段项目将严格评估软件程序在多大程度上可以增强医学院课程在上述能力以及语言和非语言沟通技能方面的能力。在第二阶段结束时，MCW将创建一个开创性的软件程序，可用于向医学生传授ACGME能力，所有医生在护理绝症患者时都应展示这些能力。 公共卫生相关性：在虚拟现实中塑造专业态度和教授人文沟通(MPathic-VR)医生很少得到有效的培训，教他们如何与晚期癌症患者沟通，帮助他们做出对患者和社会有重大情感和经济影响的艰难决定。为了解决这一沟通障碍，医学网络世界将在其非常成功的第一阶段“突发坏消息”原型的基础上，开发一个革命性的培训平台-具有高度表现力的虚拟患者和其他虚拟人角色-将帮助医学生培养洞察力、技能和能力，以患者为中心、关怀和胜任的方式处理关键的医疗对话。第二阶段的创新包括：(1)具有严格的教学方法的计划，向学习者提供具体的、个性化的、精确的、可重现的和不偏不倚的反馈，不同于人工评估者；(2)开发工具和技术，以自动化通常耗时和成本密集的创建高质量虚拟人的过程；(3)通过软件双向操作，捕捉学习者选择的言语反应和-通过网络摄像头或Kinect-学习者的非言语交流的方面；以及(4)自动化学习者评估和审查。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Modeling Professional Attitudes and Teaching Humanistic Communication in VR (MPathic-VR) Patients with life-threatening cancer need caregivers who can help them through difficult decisions by understanding their interests, values, and beliefs, and who communicate empathically with the patient's family and friends, and effectively with their medical peers. Yet medical students, residents, and even oncology fellows lack effective training in such crucial communications. Educators face great difficulty imparting ethical and professional values to medical students in traditional "chalk and talk" teaching environments. Standardized patient instructors (SPIs) have also been used to evaluate professional competencies, but they can be time- consuming, costly, and perform inconsistently over multiple student encounters. Finally, medical students themselves are generally resistant to educational measures designed to promote ethical practice and reflective professionalism as they lack experience to realize why explicit professional education matters. In Phase I, MCI successfully developed and tested MPathic-VR, a prototype virtual patient educational system designed to address weaknesses in the current medical educational paradigm. In this Phase II project, MCI proposes to greatly enhance the educational breadth and technical sophistication of the Phase I system. At the completion of Phase II, this platform will feature a rich and coherent educational experience relevant to communication in the setting of cancer, and will be tested for effectiveness in a mixed-methods trial in the curriculum of two medical schools. The project has five aims. (1) Expand the Phase I "Breaking Bad News" design into a more comprehensive training experience that addresses additional Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies. (2) Develop a character animation-authoring framework to enable the rapid creation of highly expressive virtual human characters. (3) Develop capability to capture learners' nonverbal behavior to create a natural, human-like (i.e., bi-directional and multi-modal) interaction between VHs and learners. (4) Implement automated methods to bookmark "teachable moments" occurring in each learner-VH interaction, and provide learners with summative feedback on their effective/ineffective communications. (5) Demonstrate the effectiveness of the MPathic-VR educational program in a two-armed, mixed-methods trial with a control and an intervention arm at each of two medical schools. In summary, the MPathic-VR program will place lessons about professionalism, empathy, teamwork and patient-centeredness into a context that is both highly engaging and pedagogically solid. The Phase II project will rigorously evaluate the extent to which software program can enhance medical school curricula in the above competencies, and in verbal and non-verbal communication skills. At the end of Phase II, MCW will have created a ground-breaking software program that can be used to teach medical students the ACGME competencies that all physicians should demonstrate when caring for a patient with terminal illness. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Modeling Professional Attitudes and Teaching Humanistic Communication in VR (MPathic-VR) Doctors rarely receive effective training on how to communicate with patients who have terminal cancer, to help them with difficult decisions that have great emotional and financial impacts on the patients and on society. To address this communication failure, Medical Cyberworlds will build on its very successful Phase I "Breaking Bad News" prototype and develop a revolutionary training platform-with highly expressive virtual patients and other virtual human characters-that will help medical students to develop the insight, skill and competency to handle crucial medical conversations in ways that are patient-centered, caring and competent. Phase II innovations include: (1) a program with rigorous teaching methods to give learners specific, individualized, precise, reproducible, and unbiased feedback, unlike human evaluators; (2) development of tools and techniques to automate normally time- and cost-intensive processes of creating high quality virtual humans; (3) bi-directional operation with software that capture both the learners' selected verbal responses and-through webcam or Kinect-aspects of learners' non-verbal communication; and (4) automated learner assessment and review.