ABSTRACT

Effective medical consultation requires good nonverbal communication between patients and doctors. Nonverbal behavior (NVB) mimicry, when a person imitates the NVB of the conversation partner, has been associated with building rapport between people. We study how NVB mimicry influences the quality of a medical consultation in a video conference. Computer vision algorithms were used to analyze 2027.75 minutes of recorded medical video consultations between medical students (N = 130) and volunteers who acted as Simulated Patients (SP, N = 29). We automatically detected students’ NVB mimicry to the SP and investigated the relationship between the NVB mimicry and students’ overall communication skills performance. The results highlighted the positive correlation between head nodding mimicry and assessed communication skills. In addition, we also identified NVB mimicry styles by cluster analysis and found that certain NVB mimicry styles have associated with better communication performance. These findings provide insights into the future design of systems that offer automatic feedback in communication skills training.

摘要

有效的医疗咨询要求患者和医生之间进行良好的非言语交流。当一个人模仿对话伙伴的NVB时，非语言行为（NVB）模仿与建立人与人之间的融洽关系有关。我们在视频会议中研究了NVB模仿如何影响医疗咨询质量。计算机视觉算法用于分析医学学生（N = 130）和充当模拟患者（SP，N = 29）的志愿者之间记录的2027.75分钟的医学视频咨询。我们自动检测了学生对SP的NVB模仿，并调查了NVB模仿与学生整体沟通技能表现之间的关系。结果突显了头部点头模仿和评估的沟通技巧之间的正相关性。此外，我们还通过聚类分析确定了NVB模仿样式，并发现某些NVB模仿样式与更好的通信性能相关。这些发现为将来在通信技能培训中提供自动反馈的系统设计提供了见识。