Understanding empathy training with virtual patients

Kleinsmith, Andrea; Rivera-Gutierrez, Diego J.; Finney, Glen R.; Cendán, Juan; Lok, Benjamin

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.05.033

Cited by 117 publications

(122 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…For example Kleinsmith et al (2015) has investigated empathy training with virtual patients. Here, though we consider only ethical problems in dealing with patients -where contrary to medical advice a patient demands a certain medicine; the first time that a doctor confronts this problem with a patient would typically be with a real patient.…”

Section: Doctor/patient Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality

2016

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SUMMARYVirtual reality (VR) started about 50 years ago in a form we would recognize today [stereo head-mounted display (HMD), head tracking, computer graphics generated images] -although the hardware was completely different. In the 1980s and 1990s, VR emerged again based on a different generation of hardware (e.g., CRT displays rather than vector refresh, electromagnetic tracking instead of mechanical). This reached the attention of the public, and VR was hailed by many engineers, scientists, celebrities, and business people as the beginning of a new era, when VR would soon change the world for the better. Then, VR disappeared from public view and was rumored to be "dead. " In the intervening 25 years a huge amount of research has nevertheless been carried out across a vast range of applications -from medicine to business, from psychotherapy to industry, from sports to travel. Scientists, engineers, and people working in industry carried on with their research and applications using and exploring different forms of VR, not knowing that actually the topic had already passed away.The purpose of this article is to survey a range of VR applications where there is some evidence for, or at least debate about, its utility, mainly based on publications in peer-reviewed journals. Of course not every type of application has been covered, nor every scientific paper (about 186,000 papers in Google Scholar): in particular, in this review we have not covered applications in psychological or medical rehabilitation. The objective is that the reader becomes aware of what has been accomplished in VR, where the evidence is weaker or stronger, and what can be done. We start in Section 1 with an outline of what VR is and the major conceptual framework used to understand what happens when people experience it -the concept of "presence. " In Section 2, we review some areas where VR has been used in science -mostly psychology and neuroscience, the area of scientific visualization, and some remarks about its use in education and surgical training. In Section 3, we discuss how VR has been used in sports and exercise. In Section 4, we survey applications in social psychology and related areas -how VR has been used to throw light on some social phenomena, and how it can be used to tackle experimentally areas that cannot be studied experimentally in real life. We conclude with how it has been used in the preservation of and access to cultural heritage. In Section 5, we present the domain of moral behavior, including an example of how it might be used to train professionals such as medical doctors when confronting serious dilemmas with patients. In Section 6, we consider how VR has been and might be used in various aspects of travel, collaboration, and industry. In Section 7, we consider mainly the use of VR in news presentation and also discuss different types of VR. In the concluding Section 8, we briefly consider new ideas that have recently emerged -an impossible task since during the short time we have written this page even newer idea...

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Section: Doctor/patient Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality

2016

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“…Virtual physiological humans can also be used to represent patients in the training of medical students, for example to detect cranial nerve abnormalities [2]. There is even an application for virtual avatars in training healthcare professionals to be more empathetic with promising initial results [3]. Medical students are asked to interview a virtual patient and the student's ability to respond empathetically at certain points in the interview can be evaluated in a systematic way.…”

Section: The Virtual Physiological Humanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Participatory medicine: model based tools for engaging and empowering the individual

Sagar

Broadbent

2016

Interface Focus.

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One contribution of 12 to a theme issue 'The Human Physiome: a necessary key to the creative destruction of medicine'. The long-term goal of the Virtual Physiological Human and Digital Patient projects is to run 'simulations' of health and disease processes on the virtual or 'digital' patient, and use the results to make predictions about real health and determine the best treatment specifically for an individual. This is termed 'personalized medicine', and is intended to be the future of healthcare. How will people interact and engage with their virtual selves, and how can virtual models be used to motivate people to actively participate in their own healthcare? We discuss these questions, and describe our current efforts to integrate and realistically embody psychobiological models of face-to-face interaction to enliven and increase engagement of virtual humans in healthcare. Overall, this paper highlights the need for attention to the design of human-machine interfaces to address patient engagement in healthcare.

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“…For instance, early work by Johnsen et al (2007) showed a significant correlation between medical students' performance with a virtual and a human patient, and showed that medical students were able to elicit the same information from the real and virtual human (although showing less interest and poorer attitude toward the latter). More recently, virtual patients have been used in training for mental health assessment (Foster et al, 2015;Washburn et al, 2016), empathetic communication (Kleinsmith et al, 2015), and identifying gender bias in diagnosis (Rivera-gutierrez et al, 2014). In these studies, typically, human participants interacted with virtual patients via text or voice, and the virtual patients were animated and programmed to react toward the participants in a realistic way.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Study of Professional Awareness Using Immersive Virtual Reality: The Responses of General Practitioners to Child Safeguarding Concerns

Pan

Collingwoode-Williams

Antley

et al. 2018

Front. Robot. AI

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The art of picking up signs that a child may be suffering from abuse at home is one of those skills that cannot easily be taught, given its dependence on a range of non-cognitive abilities. It is also difficult to study, given the number of factors that may interfere with this skill in a real-life, professional setting. An immersive virtual reality environment provides a way round these difficulties. In this study, we recruited 64 general practitioners (GPs), with different levels of experience. Would this level of experience have any impact on general practitioners' ability to pick up child-safeguarding concerns? Would more experienced GPs find it easier to pick up subtle (rather than obvious) signs of child-safeguarding concerns? Our main measurement was the quality of the note left by the GP at the end of the virtual consultation: we had a panel of 10 (all experienced in safeguarding) rate the note according to the extent to which they were able to identify and take the necessary steps required in relation to the child safeguarding concerns. While the level of professional experience was not shown to make any difference to a GP's ability to pick up those concerns, the parent's level of aggressive behavior toward the child did. We also manipulated the level of cognitive load (reflected in a complex presentation of the patient's medical condition): while cognitive load did have some impact upon GPs in the "obvious cue" condition (parent behaving particularly aggressively), this effect fell short of significance. Furthermore, our results also suggest that GPs who are less stressed, less neurotic, more agreeable and extroverted tend to be better at raising potential child abuse issues in their notes. These results not only point at the considerable potential of virtual reality as a training tool, they also highlight fruitful avenues for further research, as well as potential strategies to support GP's in their dealing with highly sensitive, emotionally charged situations.

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Understanding empathy training with virtual patients

Cited by 117 publications

References 29 publications

Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality

Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality

Participatory medicine: model based tools for engaging and empowering the individual

A Study of Professional Awareness Using Immersive Virtual Reality: The Responses of General Practitioners to Child Safeguarding Concerns

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