JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mental health issues among Taiwanese university students are increasingly prevalent, with 20–25% experiencing psychological distress and suicide risk becoming a major concern. Nursing students often lack structured training in self-awareness and crisis management. Current psychiatric nursing education provides limited practice on suicide-related topics, leading to anxiety and uncertainty. Integrating generative AI and game-based learning offers a promising solution to enhance emotional intelligence and crisis response skills in a safe, interactive setting.

Objective:

This study will use action research to evaluate an innovative teaching model combining AI virtual patients and game-based learning to improve nursing students’ emotional intelligence, crisis management competence, and learning engagement, while offering evidence for curriculum innovation.

Methods:

A two-cycle action research design will be conducted with nursing students in a psychiatric nursing course. The course will be incorporating card-based games for self-awareness and AI virtual patients for repeating practice in suicide risk assessment and empathetic communication. A one-group pretest-posttest design with the Adult Emotional IntelligeThe project will develop five AI virtual patient modules and aims to improve students’ emotional awareness, self-understanding, and crisis response skills. Results will support future curriculum design integrating AI and game-based learning in nursing education.nce Scale (AEIS) and qualitative data from reflections and classroom observations will be used.

Results:

The project will develop five AI virtual patient modules and aims to improve students’ emotional awareness, self-understanding, and crisis response skills. Results will support future curriculum design integrating AI and game-based learning in nursing education.

Conclusions:

This study proposes a novel teaching model integrating game-based learning and AI Virtual Human simulations to enhance emotional intelligence and crisis management skills in nursing students. Using action research and the AEIS, the intervention will be evaluated and refined. The findings may inform future AI-driven approaches in competency-based psychiatric nursing education.