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Training communication with patients is an important aspect of medical education around the world. The general complexity of communication and specifically communication with patients can be practiced with actors. However, access to this training method is restricted by limited availability of actors, complex organization of time schedules, and the need of physical training space. Our work explores the benefits of using a serious game for training patient-physician communication. The game implements the SPIKES communication model to efficiently and effectively structure such conversations. SPIKES is used for example to deliver bad news or inform patients about medical treatment plans. This paper presents the results of a first study with medical students evaluating acceptance and the educational benefit of the game as part of the communication training.
Several medical domains investigated Virtual Reality (VR) as a supporting technology for teaching and training of novices and experts. In psychotherapy, VR has been identified also as a promising treatment instrument. This paper presents a study on VR assisted psychotherapy, evaluating the effects of graphical styles on emotional states of N=74 subjects. Assessed data has been used to first statistically check, if the presented VR-scenes can create a positive emotional effect, here relaxation. In addition, we examined the difference of changes of the emotional state with respect to two different graphical styles, both being typical for state-of-the-art video games. One of these styles is supposed to render highly realistic scenes at high computational costs. The second style has been deliberately chosen, to present an alternative running smoothly also on low performance devices such as mobile phones on wireless VR devices. As a third research target, we surveyed the difference of measured effects with respect to technical background knowledge of subjects. The study has been set up as a pre-study acquiring healthy students as subjects instead of patients suffering from psychological disorders.
Virtual Reality (VR) has been proposed as an immersive medium in psychotherapy for supporting the treatment of various phobias or behavioral disorders. In classic therapy of mental disorders as well as to reduce stress, various relaxation methods are used. This includes guided imagery, i.e. verbally describing peaceful scenes of nature to the patient. This paper presents a virtual relaxation environment for portable VR systems that has been designed on the basis of theories and research in nature and environmental psychology. The aim of the system is to induce relaxation. We further report on the evaluation of a study design to prepare the system for experiments with patients, measuring relaxation by the change of affective state as well as attention restoration.
Stereotypes support a high-level software comprehension by implying roles and responsibilities of classes in software systems. We propose the idea of using stereotypes as design patterns for serious games to enhance object oriented software comprehension. These design patterns can reduce the complexity of software systems and encode software knowledge into game mechanics. We provide examples of possible game mechanics and discuss the application of the proposed design patterns.