BEHAVIOURAL SIMULATOR FOR PROFESSIONAL TRAINING BASED ON NATURAL LANGUAGE INTERACTION

The virtual patient is an online simulation system designed to train and assess relational and clinical abilities in a realistic interactive problem-based learning scenario, where users (medical students) can interact and communicate with characters specifically designed to challenge their clinical and relational skills and facilitate the generation of learning objectives. In this paper we will present an enhancement to the system by simulating a normal interview with real users through natural language, thus enabling users to behave more naturally without keyboards or other input devices. We evaluated the system with a sample of users and found that the new voice- based interaction is user-friendly and facilitates user acceptance. However, a number of limitations remain to be addressed to get the system ready for a large-scale deployment.