Virtual Human Systems for Interpersonal Interaction Education
Dr. Ben Lok, University of Florida
Friday Nov 30, 2007, 3 PM,
Room 112, Partnership II (IST building),
Research Park
Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss the development and recent advances of the Virtual OSCE (VOSCE). The VOSCE is a virtual humans (VH) system that provides patient-doctor experiences with highly interactive VH patients. In the VOSCE, health professions students interact with speech and gestures with life-sized VHs to practice and learn interpersonal communication skills. VH scenarios include a variety of patients (varied ethnicity, age, and gender) expressing conditions from abdominal pain to cranial nerve damage to breast mass screening. The VH system was developed jointly by a research group of medical faculty, educators, and computer scientists at the University of Florida, Medical College of Georgia, and Keele University, School of Pharmacy.
I will discuss our current work into providing realistic human interactions, including using real tools, physiological measures, mannequin simulators, and virtual instructors. Also, this talk will cover the results of recent studies into racial/ethnicity biases, after-action reviews, communication skills, validity, component evaluation, and high anxiety interactions (sexual history and abnormal findings).
Biography
Benjamin C. Lok is an Assistant Professor in the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Department at the University of Florida. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgical Oncology at the Medical College of Georgia. His research areas include computer graphics, virtual environments, and human-computer interaction. Professor Lok graduated from the University of Tulsa with a B.S. (1997) degree in Computer Science, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a MS (1999) and Ph.D. (2002). His mentors include Drs. Sujeet Shenoi (B.S.), Fred Brooks Jr. (Ph.D.), and Larry Hodges (post-doc). Professor Lok received a NSF Career Award in 2007 and the UF ACM Teacher of the Year Award in 2005-2006. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society. For more information, please visit http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~lok.
