@inproceedings{bffa878001ea45ab80d455e63300dbbd,
title = "Virtual humans for training and assessment of self-medication consultation skills in pharmacy students",
abstract = "This Virtual patients have been used since the 1990's in pharmacy education for teaching and assessment of clinical and communication skills. Although their use is still limited, they allow students' engagement in true-to-life situations in a controllable environment. This paper describes an interactive application to assist in the academic training and assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences students. Virtual humans play the role of patients and communicate with the student by speech and by facial and body language. The application comprises two usage modes: (i) the training mode, used autonomously by the student, gives detailed information about his performance and indicates places where he may find additional information, and (ii) the assessment mode which is used by the teacher to evaluate the student's performance. The process used to feed case-scenarios in the application does not require informatics skills because it resorts to an easy-to-use graphical interface. A BackOffice Web application was implemented to allow the creation of new self-medication situations and the collection of data about students' performance. The application was tested by a restricted group of experts whose overall opinion was quite positive about the usefulness of the application as a tool to improve students' as well as professionals' communication skills.",
keywords = "Pharmacy students, Virtual humans, communication skills, consultation skills, self-medication",
author = "Cl{\'a}udio, {Ana Paula} and Carmo, {Maria Beatriz} and Vitor Pinto and Afonso Cavaco and Guerreiro, {Mara Pereira}",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2015 IEEE.; 10th International Conference on Computer Science and Education, ICCSE 2015 ; Conference date: 22-07-2015 Through 24-07-2015",
year = "2015",
month = sep,
day = "9",
doi = "10.1109/ICCSE.2015.7250238",
language = "English",
series = "10th International Conference on Computer Science and Education, ICCSE 2015",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
pages = "175--180",
booktitle = "10th International Conference on Computer Science and Education, ICCSE 2015",
address = "United States",
}
