Work-in-Progress—Testing of a Virtual Patient: Linguistic and Display Engagement Findings

This work-in-progress paper reports the development and testing of an innovative virtual patient simulation application for medical education. The goal was to make the conversation-based simulation experience both natural and authentic, with a focus on the language processing and visualization components. Metrics measuring student engagement and session flow were collected from 115 sessions completed by 57 participants. Preliminary analysis found average conversational turn time longer during development compared to testing (p=0.044) and greater number of topic matches for participants viewing the patient on a holographic display compared to participants viewing the patient on a monitor (p=0.004).