Abstract:

Restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic have prevented medical students from having regular access to hospitals in Romania. This caused a disruption in the normal educational flow that leads medical students to gain essential skills and experience in the practice of consulting and diagnosing a patient.

To alleviate the issue a web-based platform has been developed which enables medical students to reproduce their usual interaction with patients that takes place in hospitals. The platform allows medical students to interact with virtual patients through text and speech interactions. It allows them to access the medical records of the virtual patient, to perform the objective exam (cardiac and pulmonary auscultation), to ask and visualize different health investigations, as well as to provide presumptive, differential and final diagnoses. In addition, the platform scores the evolution of the medical students. It also allows doctors and professors to follow remotely, in real time, the evolution of the medical students and to engage during the session. A detailed report about each session is generated and stored in the profile of the medical student, as well as in the profiles of his/her doctors and professors.

The platform runs an engine that is capable of generating clinically valid patient cases starting from an initially provided set of real-world cases. The initial scenarios have been developed for the symptoms associated with pulmonary thromboembolism (PET), while further extension to other diseases is scheduled after a more thorough usability evaluation by both medical students and professors.

Keywords:

e-learning, Educational Software, Education in Medical Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Web Interfaces, Simulation Engine.