Modeling Professional Attitudes and Teaching Humanistic Communication in VR

描述（由申请人提供）：在VR中塑造职业态度和教授人文交流（MPathic-VR）危及生命的癌症患者需要能够通过了解他们的兴趣、价值观和信仰来帮助他们做出艰难决定的护理人员，并且能够与患者的家人和朋友进行共情沟通，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这种重要沟通的有效培训。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）也被用于评估专业能力，但它们可能耗时，昂贵，并且在多次学生接触中表现不一致。最后，医学生本身通常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成功开发并测试了MPathic-VR，这是一种原型虚拟患者教育系统，旨在解决当前医学教育范式中的弱点。在这个第二期项目中，MCI建议大大提高第一期系统的教育广度和技术复杂性。在第二阶段完成后，该平台将提供与癌症背景下的沟通相关的丰富而连贯的教育经验，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“突发坏消息”设计扩展为更全面的培训体验，以解决研究生医学教育认证委员会（ACGME）的其他核心能力。(2)开发一个人物动画创作框架，以便快速创建具有高度表现力的虚拟人物角色。(3)培养捕捉学习者非语言行为的能力，在视频教学和学习者之间创造一种自然的、类似人类的（即双向和多模态）互动。(4)采用自动化的方法，将每次学习者与vh互动中出现的“教学时刻”收藏起来，并为学习者提供有效/无效沟通的总结性反馈。(5)在两所医学院分别进行对照组和干预组的双臂混合方法试验，证明MPathic-VR教育计划的有效性。总之，MPathic-VR项目将把专业精神、同理心、团队合作和以病人为中心的课程放在一个高度吸引人、教学扎实的环境中。第二阶段项目将严格评估软件程序能在多大程度上提高医学院课程的上述能力，以及口头和非口头沟通技巧。在第二阶段结束时，MCW将创建一个开创性的软件程序，可用于教授医学生ACGME能力，所有医生在照顾绝症患者时都应该展示这些能力。

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.