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Training doctors’ social skills to break bad news: evaluation of the impact of virtual environment displays on the sense of presence

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Abstract

The way doctors deliver bad news has a significant impact on the therapeutic process. In order to facilitate doctor’s training, we have developed an embodied conversational agent simulating a patient to train doctors to break bad news. In this article, we present an evaluation of the virtual reality training platform comparing the users’ experience depending on the virtual environment displays: a PC desktop, a virtual reality headset, and four wall fully immersive systems. The results of the experience, including both real doctors and naive participants, reveal a significant impact of the environment display on the perception of the user (sense of presence, sense of co-presence, perception of the believability of the virtual patient), showing, moreover, the different perceptions of the participants depending on their level of expertise.

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Notes

  1. The French National Authority for Health is an independent public scientific authority with an overall mission of contributing to the regulation of the healthcare system by improving health quality and efficiency.

  2. ACORFORMed, http://www.lpl-aix.fr/~ acorformed/.

  3. http://virtualpatients.eu/.

  4. Note that no consensus exists on the notion of co-presence. A detailed discussion on the different definitions can be found in [5].

  5. The scenario has been carefully chosen with the medical partners of the project for several reasons (e.g. the panel of resulting damages, the difficulty of the announcement, its standard characteristics of announce).

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Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by the French National Research Agency project ACORFORMED (ANR-14-CE24-0034-02) and supported by Grants ANR-16-CONV-0002 (ILCB), ANR-11-LABX-0036 (BLRI) and ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02 (A*MIDEX).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS, LIS UMR 7020, LPL UMR 7309, ISM UMR7287, Département anesthésie réanimation, Institut Paoli Calmettes, Aix Marseille Université, Université de Toulon, Marseille, France

    Magalie Ochs, Daniel Mestre, Grégoire de Montcheuil, Jean-Marie Pergandi, Jorane Saubesty, Evelyne Lombardo, Daniel Francon & Philippe Blache

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  1. Magalie Ochs
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  2. Daniel Mestre
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  3. Grégoire de Montcheuil
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  4. Jean-Marie Pergandi
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Correspondence to Magalie Ochs.

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Ochs, M., Mestre, D., de Montcheuil, G. et al. Training doctors’ social skills to break bad news: evaluation of the impact of virtual environment displays on the sense of presence. J Multimodal User Interfaces 13, 41–51 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-018-0289-8

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