Medical Applications
Virtual Psychiatrist
Researchers from the Institute of Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, have created a new way to help patients with PTSD as well as other people benifiting from therapy. To do this, they created a virtual counselor. Lead by Gale Lucas, a psychologist at ICT, they have shown that patients are even more likely to open up to a virtual counselor than a real one. "People are very open to feeling connected to things that aren't people," he says. This virtual counselor, named Ellie, uses compyter vision to "interpret test subjects' verbal and facial cues and respond supportively." As seen in the video, she not only can nod, smile, and utter an "mhm", but she knows when to do each of them. This raport building strategy utilizes so-called 'backchannels' and they have been shown to encourage sharing. This technology could allow for more people, veterans especially, to have access to essential mental health treatments. [16]
Snow World
While this is not necessarily a virtual human, researchers have developed a new virtual reality video game called "SnowWorld" that helps patients suffering from burns last through painful treatments. This treatment plan reduces patient's pain by distracting them from the horrendously painful rehabilitation. Additionally, the motions required are therapeutic in themselves. Testimony from patients and their doctors have proven that "SnowWorld" and systems like it, definitely have a place in the medical field. [17]
Doc On
Human connection is a powerful tactic particularly in the medical field. Often, doctors of all kinds attempt to establish raport with pacients before commenceing treatment. Unfortunately this becomes more difficult when some patients see their doctors so infrequently. One way to mitigte this, is with a new app called Doc On [18]. This app allows doctors and patients to connect digitally and have more contact. Their current implementation allows doctors to "maintain prescription records, plot on latest growth charts ..., [document] Vaccination Reminders, Development Milestones for kids" and much more. With a 4.2/5.0 rating on the app store, this app certainly shows promise in creating virtual doctor/patient relationships. Taking this further however, USC's Center for Body Computing is taking this DocOn app further and actually digitizing the doctors themselves. This new version of DocOn would allow doctors to directly monitor diet, activity levels, and other important health markers and then relay advice back to the patients through virtual doctors. "It’s not intended to replace regular visits with doctors, but instead give patients additional resources to learn about their health", says Scott Dorman, managing director of the Center for Body Computing. While focusing mainly on cardiovascular health at the moment, the researchers plan to expand this Virtual Care Clinic further in the future [19].
