Thursday, October 18, 2007
11:00a.m. - 12:00p.m.

Andrew B. Raij will discuss the development and recent advances of the Virtual OSCE (VOSCE). The VOSCE is a virtual experience that simulates a patient-doctor interview using highly interactive virtual humans. In the VOSCE, health professions students interact with life-sized virtual humans using speech and gesture. Through this interaction, students practice and learn interpersonal communication skills. VOSCE scenarios include a variety of patients (varied ethnicity, age, and gender) expressing conditions from abdominal pain to cranial nerve damage to breast mass screening. The VOSCE system was developed jointly by a research group of medical faculty, educators, and computer scientists at the University of Florida, Medical College of Georgia, and Keele University, School of Pharmacy.

The presentation will emphasize current work into providing realistic patient interactions, including using real tools, physiological measures, mannequin simulators, and virtual instructors. Also, this talk will cover the results of recent studies that explore racial/ethnicity biases, after-action reviews, communication skills, validity, component evaluation, and high anxiety interactions (sexual history and abnormal findings) with virtual humans.

Biography
Andrew B. Raij is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Department at the University of Florida. His research areas include computer graphics, computer vision, human-computer interaction and virtual reality. Raij graduated from Northwestern University with a B.S. (2001) degree in Computer Science, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a MS (2003). His mentors include Drs. Benjamin Watson and Ian Horswill (B.S.), Henry Fuchs, Herman Towles, and Marc Pollefeys (M.S.), and Benjamin Lok (Ph.D.). For more information, please visit http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~raij.