Training Physiotherapy Students in Clinical Questioning and Reasoning using a Chatbot
Team Member
- Dr. Chien Ching Lee (PI)
- Dr. Benjamin Soon (Co-PI)
- Dr. Malcolm Low (Co-PI)
- Dr. Hwee Hoon Lee (Co-PI)
- Dr. Nadya Shaznay Patel (Co-PI)
- Dr. Liming Lu (Co-PI)
- Selvakulasingam Thiruneepan (Co-PI)
Project Start & End Date
- Jan 2022 – June 2023
Channel of Collaboration and/or Funding
- SIT Applied Learning and Innovation Grant (ALIGN) Grant
Problem to Solve
- Standardized patients actors are engaged to train physiotherepy (PT) students on predefined scenarios to support learning and assessment
- Some of the challenges faced in the use of standardized patients:
- Inauthentic – reliant on their acting skills to depict various conditions and symptoms
- Fidelity might suffer as standardized patients take on multiple roles
- Have to keep to the script while acting to ensure accuracy and validity of content conveyed
- Provide feedback to learners after the role play
- Long training period needed to support standardized patients to produce a high-quality simulation
- Costly to sustain the use of standardized patients, cannot cater to a large group of students
Solution and Notable Contribution
- Chatbots have been found to produce positive outcomes in history-taking, clinical reasoning and interactions skills
- Development of a chatbot Virtual Patient (VP) to improve physiotherapy students’ clinical questioning and reasoning skills
Notable Outcome(s) / Progress and Next Step / Potential of Wider Application
- An AI chatbot VP has been developed to give PT students the opportunity to experience history-taking with VPs before their clinical placement.
- The system is developed using an Unity 3D avatar frontend, with the Google DialogFlow chatbot engine and Amazon AWS Lambda backend.
Publication
- Chienching Lee, Malcolm Low, Benjamin Soon, Liming Lu, Hweehoon Lee and Nadya Shaznay Patel, “Training Physiotherapy Students in Clinical Questioning and Reasoning using a Chatbot”, 2022 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE2022) (to appear), 2022.
Media
Chatbot demo