Virtual humans for training and assessment of self-medication consultation skills in pharmacy students

Abstract

This Virtual patients have been used since the 1990's in pharmacy education for teaching and assessment of clinical and communication skills. Although their use is still limited, they allow students' engagement in true-to-life situations in a controllable environment. This paper describes an interactive application to assist in the academic training and assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences students. Virtual humans play the role of patients and communicate with the student by speech and by facial and body language. The application comprises two usage modes: (i) the training mode, used autonomously by the student, gives detailed information about his performance and indicates places where he may find additional information, and (ii) the assessment mode which is used by the teacher to evaluate the student's performance. The process used to feed case-scenarios in the application does not require informatics skills because it resorts to an easy-to-use graphical interface. A BackOffice Web application was implemented to allow the creation of new self-medication situations and the collection of data about students' performance. The application was tested by a restricted group of experts whose overall opinion was quite positive about the usefulness of the application as a tool to improve students' as well as professionals' communication skills.

Virtual Humans Playing the Role of Patients in Self-medication Consultations: Perspectives of Undergraduate Pharmacy Students

“…This paper describes an interactive application to support skills training and assessment of undergraduate Pharmaceutical Sciences students and continues previous works from the same team (Cláudio et al, 2015a). Although training and assessing professional competence is a multidimensional reality, which involves trainees' work beyond passing or failing exams, but collecting evidence of competence (i.e.…”

Scenarios in virtual learning environments for one-to-one communication skills training

“…The majority of the papers in the literature (Bosse and Provoost 2015;Bracegirdle and Chapman 2010;Cláudio et al 2015;Gebhard et al 2011;Jeuring et al 2015;Réty et al 2008) describe a communication exchange between a player and a virtual character as a tree, graph or chart. Communication flows from a virtual character to a player and viceversa.…”

“…Since we search for literature on serious or applied games, most papers (Bosse and Provoost 2015;Bracegirdle and Chapman 2010;Cláudio et al 2015;Gebhard et al 2011;Guo et al 2014;Jeuring et al 2015;Wauters et al 2012) mention learning goals. A player's choices determine his/her score on these learning goals.…”

“…After scanning the abstracts returned by our query and the suggestions from the communication skills teachers, we selected nine papers that describe a learning environment with scripted communication skills scenarios (Bosse and Provoost 2015;Bracegirdle and Chapman 2010;Cláudio et al 2015;Gebhard et al 2011;Guo et al 2014;Jeuring et al 2015;Leuski and Traum 2011;Réty et al 2008;Wauters et al 2012).…”

“…We define a communication exchange, often dealing with a particular subject, as a DAG. Characteristics of a subject DAG, as found in commercially available dialogue authoring assets/tools and in the literature (Bosse and Provoost 2015;Cláudio et al 2015;Jeuring et al 2015;Réty et al 2008), are:…”