Patients Should Not Be Passive! Creating and Managing Active Virtual Patients in Virtual Clinical Environments

Abstract

Games can be serious. In the case of games for medical professionals, often very serious, as they are used to train for activities that are literally lifesaving. To achieve ’suspension of disbelief’ among medical professionals, a game must be realistic in terms of its’ interactive elements i.e. both the objects and the actors in the virtual environment. The central and key actor is the patient. Given the complexity of the real world patient, then it is unsurprising that ‘the patient’ in most virtual environments is but a pale representation of real world patients. This paper describes work-in-progress in an already widely deployed clinical immersive environment, CliniSpace, in building believable, and as importantly manageable, real time virtual patients with an approach called ‘active virtual patient management’ which offers both stand-alone customisable authoring and real-time virtual patient management to deliver believable virtual patients for medical education.