Design and evaluation of a BDI-based Virtual Patient for the Education of Shared Decision Making

Design and evaluation of a BDI-based Virtual Patient for the Education of Shared Decision Making

Lie, Han (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Brinkman, W.P. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Computer Science | Data Science and Technology

2018-12-14

On a regular basis doctors need to hold difficult conversations with patients. In shared decision making (SDM) conversations patients and doctors work together to get to a medical decision by talking about the patients preferences and values and the possible options and their respective risks and benefits. Good communication through the use of SDM should help in finding the best course of action for both doctor and patient. Currently SDM is learnt through workshops where medical students and professionals get to act out SDM conversations with an actor. These workshops are expensive and logistically hard to organise. A virtual patient could help with the education of SDM, as it would be easier accessible and students could more often practice their conversation skills. This thesis proposes a virtual patient system to teach SDM. The system allowed users to hold a SDM conversation with a virtual patient by making it possible to provide the virtual patient with information through speech and ask questions through text. Users were furthermore able to receive feedback on their performance after a conversation. At its core the virtual patient contained a BDI-based reasoning model, which made it possible for the virtual patient to deliberate about information it had received from the user. The experiment that was conducted suggested that medical students were able to hold a SDM conversation with the virtual patient. The results indicated that, even though the speech recognition was prone to underclassify certain subjects that a users talked about, there was an overall increase in SDM performance throughout the conversations users had with the virtual patient. Users felt that the feedback component of the system was educational with regards to teach wanted behaviour and knowledge. They also found that their opinion on the usefulness of virtual patients as an educative tool had increased after using it.

BDI
virtual patient
shared decision making

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7f5d8e12-bd75-4d1f-aba5-324103fe0420

Student theses

master thesis

© 2018 Han Lie