This research project will incorporate haptics and devices into "virtual humans" to investigate interpersonal interactions with medical students and these simulated patients. Prior virtual human work has identified that the lowered engagement level of students and the lack of haptics hampered the fidelity and applicability of virtual human experiences. To enhance human-virtual-human experiences, this project will develop and evaluate mixed reality humans. Mixed reality humans (MRH) in this project will integrate haptics, physical objects, and physiological monitoring to form simulated conversational partners. MRHs will be evaluated in a series of studies with students in the health profession. As part of coursework, students will experience a series of Human-MRH interactions. The impact of MRHs on interpersonal patient scenarios will be evaluated with behavioral, physiological, and self-report measures.
The developed MRHs will be integrated into course work of medical, nursing, and physician assistant students. These students will be provided new opportunities to practice interpersonal scenarios associated with intimate exams. Intimate exams tend to be high-anxiety interactions, and include exams of the breast, pelvic, and prostate. Improving student communication skills in intimate exams has the potential to directly impact patient care quality and patient outcomes. It is difficult to provide technology-based experience with these exams with existing technologies; thus there is good potential for impact through development and research of MRHs. This technology will also be integrated into a health exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, FL. The exhibit will have thousands of visitors interacting with virtual human doctors and patients to receive important health information while interacting with and experiencing the affective capabilities of virtual humans.
This project established that mixed reality humans - a combination of computer-graphics 3D virtual humans and physical simulators - can be used to train medical students on the stressful interpersonal scenarios of breast and prostate exams. To this end, computer systems were developed for medical students to practice focused conversations with the mixed reality human to practice communication skills while performing breast and prostate exams on a virtual character. This provided valuable experiences and feedback on performance to learners to conduct a more thorough and effective intimate exam. As part of this award, hundreds of students have interacted with virtual patients as part of their education at Georgia Regeants University, University of Florida, and Drexel University. As part of this award, a public health literacy exhibit was created at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa, FL. Using this exhibit, thousands of museum visitors have interacted with virtual humans to increase public health literacy on topics such as melenoma, asthma, and general health and wellness. A similar exhibit was then created at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, OH. The intellectual property from this award has been licensed by Shadow Health, Inc. Shadow Health (co-founded by the PI) now employs over 45 developers, educators, sales, customer support, QA, and nurses. The jobs created are high-pay, high-skill (most require a technical college degree) and has helped in the reviatlization of the downtown area. The broader impact is the expanding of computing to address simulating intimate exams (which currently have limited training methods). . The work into mixed reality humans as conversational partners for interpersonal skills communication has developed into a significant research area. Our research group has used the findings in this work to continue to expand the applicability of mixed reality humans and we were recently awarded a grant to use mixed reality humans to simulate medical team training. This award has resulted in: 1. The expanding of simulation and training to stressful interpersonal skills. 2. Improving heatlh care in the United States through the curricular exposure and training of hundreds of health care students on critical prostate and breast exam interactions with novel feedback on social, cognitive, and psychomotor performance. 3. Using museum exhibits with virtual humans to provide the general public to increase public health literacy. 4. The establishment of mixed reality humans as a research area with future applicability to team training.
