Engineering Social Agent Creation into an Opportunity for Interviewing and Interpersonal Skills Training

The use of intelligent, interactive social agents for clinical interviewing and interpersonal skills training in healthcare education has been observed to be on the increase. However, enabling rapid and scalable creation of robust and diverse intelligent social agents that can be integrated into educational curriculum for pedagogical reasons is still a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel approach for creating virtual patients (social agents that play the role of a patient) by reusing conversational corpus information from previous student-created interactive social agents. In this approach, healthcare students as part of an interpersonal skills training exercise create their own virtual patients. These virtual patient agents created are demonstrated to be effective tools to train other students in the future with their interviewing and interpersonal skills. By integrating virtual patient creation exercises in seven health professions courses over six years, we have demonstrated that healthcare students can create robust and diverse virtual patient social agents that can be used as pedagogical tools and in the process of creation also improve their own clinical interviewing and interpersonal skills.