Title: Creating intelligent virtual patients for simulation-based pharmacy education through human-centred conversation modelling

Authors: Joshua Jackson; Sanghoon Park

Addresses: Jackson Instructional LLC, 5310 Terraza Court, Temple Terrace, Florida 33617, USA ' Instructional Technology Program, Department of Educational and Psychological Studies, College of Education, 302K, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA

Abstract: Virtual Patients (VPs) with interactive conversational abilities are essential to create a fully immersive simulation in healthcare education. This paper presents a VP design case guided by educational design research that took the formative design approach towards their VR design and continuously refined them. The specific refinement processes used in the case include three phases of expert review, Human-centred distributed Conversation Modelling (HCM), and performance data analysis. HCM was employed as an integral approach to overcome limitations of the traditional Centralised Conversational Modelling (CCM). This paper describes each of the three phases and presents evaluation findings (continuity error rates, unanswered question error rates, and total error rates) using the three designed VPs for the Over-the-Counter (OTC) simulation for pharmacy students and further shares the useful knowledge constructed in creating VPs and lessons learned in the design process.

Keywords: virtual patient; simulation; pharmacy education; HCM; human-centred conversation modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSMARTTL.2020.112146

International Journal of Smart Technology and Learning, 2020 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.96 - 114

Received: 20 Nov 2019
Accepted: 21 Jul 2020
Published online: 04 Jan 2021 *

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