Emotional state and behavior analysis in a virtual reality environment: A medical application

Abstract

The performance and reactions of an individual in urgent situations vary according to his emotional states, which are subject to sudden changes. In medical situation, when patient’s life is in danger, the doctor’s emotional states are provoked and could affect his decisions. Virtual reality environments represent immersive situations in which we can dynamically simulate medical cases and particularly emergency cases. Using virtual reality and EEG devices, we can analyze the doctor’s emotional state and behavior without risk. In this paper, we propose to generate medical cases that can induce frustration or stress which can be at the origin of mistakes from the student. For that, we created a neurofeedback system named “Hypocrates” composed of a virtual reality environment, a medical cases generator and an intelligent agent. An experimental study involving 15 students in medicine was conducted to evaluate our approach. Results show that, the mistakes generally increase the frustration of medical students and decrease their performance.