Development and Evaluation of Embodiment Avatar System to Support Communication for Clinical Engineer Students．

Medical professionals need to use special communication skills with patients, and there are various curricula to educate them. On the other hand, there is no such curriculum in Japanese clinical engineer training schools, and there are few opportunities to develop communication skills. Therefore, we developed a prototype of a system that uses a rule-based chatbot created with reference to the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE), an examination for physicians, and an avatar that reflects the user's body movements to interact with it. In the created virtual space, an agent playing a patient equipped with a rule-based chatbot responds to the user's voice, while the avatar reflects the user's body movements in real time using a camera built into the PC or connected to an external device. The avatar exists in the same space as the agent, and the user can observe the avatar objectively. To confirm the effectiveness of this system as a teaching material, we conducted a conversation experiment in a virtual space using avatars reflecting physical movements for students with no clinical training experience practice. After the experiment, sensory evaluation was conducted through questionnaires and free descriptions. The results showed that evaluations related to avatars were high and evaluations related to agents were low. The system itself was also highly evaluated, indicating the acceptability, effectiveness, and potential use of this system as a System to Support Communication.