Instantiating interactive narratives from patient education documents

Abstract

In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept demonstrator of an Interactive Narrative for patient education. Traditionally, patient education documents are produced by health agencies, yet these documents can be challenging to understand for a large fraction of the population. In contrast, an Interactive Narrative supports a game-like exploration of the situations described in patient education documents, which should facilitate understanding, whilst also familiarising patients with real-world situations. A specific feature of our prototype is that its plan-based narrative representations can be instantiated in part from the original patient education document, using NLP techniques. In the paper we introduce our interactive narrative techniques and follow this with a discussion of specific issues in text interpretation related to the occurrence of clinical actions. We then suggest mechanisms to generate direct or indirect representations of such actions in the virtual world as part of Interactive Narrative generation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.