Abstract
Communication is important in clinical interaction; thus medical students require communication skills training. Most training programs focus on developing students’ verbal skills, and nonverbal communication is not given sufficient attention. This paper describes a tele-health training platform EQClinic, which has the capability of automatically detecting nonverbal behaviour in tele-consultations and providing medical students with human and computer-generated feedback for improving their communication skills. In this paper, we describe EQClinic’s components and report preliminary results from an 8-week user study with 135 medical students. The students were provided two opportunities of having face-to-face consultation, and between these two consultations students were also asked to complete a tele-consultation using EQClinic. Student found the system usable and their scores in the second face-to-face consultations improved after the tele-consultation (from 12.58 to 13.53, p = 0.005). The results suggest that EQClinic positively influenced medical students’ learning and may be a valuable tool in medical education.
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This project was funded by an internal grant from the Brain and Mind Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia and Australian Government. RC is funded by the Australian Research Council.
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Liu, C., Calvo, R.A., Lim, R., Taylor, S. (2016). EQClinic: A Platform for Improving Medical Students’ Clinical Communication Skills. In: Yin, X., Geller, J., Li, Y., Zhou, R., Wang, H., Zhang, Y. (eds) Health Information Science. HIS 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10038. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48335-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48335-1_8
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