To Speak or to Text: Effects of Display Type and I/O Style on Mobile Virtual Humans Nurse Training

Abstract

Nursing programs are designed to teach students the knowledge, skill and attitudes needed to provide nursing care to patients of various ages, genders, cultures and religious backgrounds. Traditionally, students acquire these skills through patient interaction. There have been shown benefits to training nurses, and other medical students, via embodied virtual humans. We have designed a system to enable mobile interactive training for nursing students using an embodied conversational virtual human. Furthermore, we conducted a study to compare whether display type and interaction type have an effect on users’ interactions. In this paper, we present the details of our system and results from our user study. Our results could have impact for designing and using VH training systems.