Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: May 8, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: May 9, 2019 - Jul 4, 2019
Date Accepted: Aug 31, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Development of a Virtual Counseling Application Using Artificial Intelligence for Communication Skills Training in Nursing Education
ABSTRACT
Background:
The ability of nursing undergraduates to communicate effectively with patients, healthcare providers, and family members is crucial to their nursing profession, because it can affect patient outcomes. However, the traditional use of didactic lectures for communication skills training is ineffective, and the use of standardized patients is not time- or cost-effective. Given the ability of virtual patients to simulate an interactive and authentic clinical scenario in a secured environment with unlimited training attempts, it is an ideal platform for nursing students to hone their communication skills before their clinical posting.
Objective:
To develop and test the use of virtual patients in better preparing nursing undergraduates in communicating with real-life patients, family members, and other healthcare professionals during their clinical posting.
Methods:
The stages of creation of the virtual patients included preparation, design, and development, followed by a testing phase before official implementation. The initial voice chatbot was trained using a natural language processing engine, Google’s Dialogflow, and was later visualized into a three-dimensional avatar form using Unity 3D.
Results:
The virtual patients included four case scenarios, which were congruent with nursing undergraduates’ current semester learning objectives: 1) assessing the pain experienced by a pregnant woman, 2) taking the history of a depressed patient, 3) escalating a bleeding episode of a postoperative patient to the physician, and 4) showing empathy to a stressed-out fellow final-year nursing student.
Conclusions:
The creation of virtual patients to assist in nursing students’ communication skills training may provide an authentic learning environment that enhances students’ perceived self-efficacy and confidence in effective communication skills. However, given the infancy stage of this project, further refinement and constant enhancements are needed to train the virtual patients to simulate real-life conversations before official implementation. Future development of virtual patients can be enhanced from the experiences shared by the research team in this study. Clinical Trial: NA
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