An Emotionally Responsive Virtual Parent for Pediatric Nursing Education: A Framework for Multimodal Momentary and Accumulated Interventions

Immersive virtual reality (VR) simulations become more and more popular for basic nursing skills training in a realistic VR environment. However, there is still a gap of research that specifically focuses on pediatric nursing interventions where nurse trainees should be able to recognize and deal with the patient parent’s emotional responses appropriately. In this paper, we propose a novel nursing intervention analysis framework that evaluates the user’s nursing performance, by analyzing not only their momentary multimodal (verbal and nonverbal) behaviors, but also accumulated intervention behaviors that capture the overall nursing context. Based on the proposed framework, we developed an immersive VR-based nursing education system with an emotionally responsive virtual parent, and designed a realistic pediatric nursing intervention scenario in collaboration with a subject-matter expert (a nursing faculty in our university). An expert-evaluation study with professional nurses was conducted to assess the potential of the developed system—in particular, the effects of the emotionally responsive virtual parent— as an effective education tool, by comparing with an emotionally static/neutral virtual parent. Several factors of learning experience, e.g., immersion, realism, learning efficacy, and usefulness, were examined through a subjective questionnaire, and the results support the effectiveness of our system in clinical practice or educational settings. We discuss the findings and implications of our research with the nurse participants’ qualitative feedback, while also addressing possible limitations and future research directions.