Objective structured clinical interview training using a virtual human patient.
Effective interview skills are a core competency for psychiatry residents and developing psychotherapists. Although schools commonly make use of standardized patients to teach interview skills, the diversity of the scenarios standardized patients can characterize is limited by availability of human actors. Further, there is the economic concern related to the time and money needed to train standardized patients. Perhaps most damaging is the "standardization" of standardized patients -- will they in fact consistently proffer psychometrically reliable and valid interactions with the training clinicians. Virtual Human Agent (VHA) technology has evolved to a point where researchers may begin developing mental health applications that make use of virtual reality patients. The work presented here is a preliminary attempt at what we believe to be a large application area. Herein we describe an ongoing study of our virtual patients (VP). We present an approach that allows novice mental health clinicians to conduct an interview with a virtual character that emulates an adolescent male with conduct disorder. This study illustrates the ways in which a variety of core research components developed at the University of Southern California facilitates the rapid development of mental health applications.
Parsons
Thomas D
TD
Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90292-4019, USA. tparsons@usc.edu
Kenny
Patrick
P
Ntuen
Celestine A
CA
Pataki
Caroly S
CS
Pato
Michele T
MT
Rizzo
Albert A
AA
St-George
Cheryl
C
Sugar
Jeffery
J
D002140:California; D003194:Computer-Assisted Instruction; D006801:Humans; D007406:Interview, Psychological; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000193:education*; D014584:User-Computer Interface