Eric Forbell

An Intelligent Virtual Human System For Providing Healthcare Information And Support

Abstract Over the last 15 years, a virtual revolution has taken place in the use of Virtual Reality simulation technology for clinical purposes. Shifts in the social and scientific landscape have now set the stage for the next major movement in Clinical Virtual Reality with the “birth” of intelligent virtual humans. Seminal research and development has appeared in the creation of highly interactive, artificially intelligent and natural language capable virtual human agents that can engage real human users in a credible fashion. No longer at the level of a prop to add context or minimal faux interaction in a virtual world, virtual humans can be designed to perceive and act in a 3D virtual world, engage in spoken dialogs with real users and can be capable of exhibiting human-like emotional reactions. This paper will present an overview of the SimCoach project that aims to develop virtual human support agents to serve as online guides for promoting access to psychological healthcare information and for assisting military personnel and family members in breaking down barriers to initiating care. The SimCoach experience is being designed to attract and engage military Service Members, Veterans and their significant others who might not otherwise seek help with a live healthcare provider. It is expected that this experience will motivate users to take the first step – to empower themselves to seek advice and information regarding their healthcare and general personal welfare and encourage them to take the next step towards seeking other, more formal resources if needed.

Virtual Reality Applications to Address the Wounds of War

Healio.com/Psychiatry | 123 Numerous reports indicate that the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in returning Operation Enduring Freedom/ Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) military personnel is creating a significant behavioral health care challenge. These findings have served to motivate research on how to better develop and disseminate evidence-based treatments for PTSD. This article details how virtual reality applications are being designed and implemented across various points in the military deployment cycle to prevent, identify, and treat combat-related PTSD in OEF/ OIF service members and veterans. The summarized projects in these areas have been developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT), a US Army University Affiliated Research Center, and will detail efforts to use virtual reality to deliver exposure therapy and provide stress resilience training prior to deployVirtual Reality Applications to Address the Wounds of War

Virtual Humans for Learning

Virtual humans are computer-generated characters designed to look and behave like real people. Studies have shown that virtual humans can mimic many of the social effects that one finds in human-human interactions such as creating rapport, and people respond to virtual humans in ways that are similar to how they respond to real people. We believe that virtual humans represent a new metaphor for interacting with computers, one in which working with a computer becomes much like interacting with a person and this can bring social elements to the interaction that are not easily supported with conventional interfaces. We present two systems that embody these ideas. The first, the Twins are virtual docents in the Museum of Science, Boston, designed to engage visitors and raise their awareness and knowledge of science. The second SimCoach, uses an empathetic virtual human to provide veterans and their families with information about PTSD and depression.

Autonomous Virtual Human Agents for Healthcare Information Support and Clinical Interviewing

This chapter discusses virtual human (VH) conversational agents to support client interaction within a healthcare context. After a brief discussion of the history of VHs in the Clinical Virtual Reality domain, applications where a VH can provide private online healthcare information and support (i.e., SimCoach) and where a VH can serve the role as a clinical interviewer (i.e., SimSensei) are presented.

Improving Classification-Based Natural Language Understanding with Non-Expert Annotation

Although data-driven techniques are commonly used for Natural Language Understanding in dialogue systems, their efficacy is often hampered by the lack of appropriate annotated training data in sufficient amounts. We present an approach for rapid and cost-effective annotation of training data for classification-based language understanding in conversational dialogue systems. Experiments using a webaccessible conversational character that interacts with a varied user population show that a dramatic improvement in natural language understanding and a substantial reduction in expert annotation effort can be achieved by leveraging non-expert annotation.

Natural Language Understanding Performance & Use Considerations in Virtual Medical Encounters.

A virtual standardized patient (VSP) prototype was tested for natural language understanding (NLU) performance. The conversational VSP was evaluated in a controlled 61 subject study over four repetitions of a patient case. The prototype achieved more than 92% appropriate response rate from naïve users on their first attempt and results were stable by their fourth case repetition. This level of performance exceeds prior efforts and is at a level comparable of accuracy as seen in human conversational patient training, with caveats. This level of performance was possible due to the use of a unified medical taxonomy underpinning that allows virtual patient language training to be applied to all cases in our system as opposed to benefiting a single patient case.