Clincal Encounters is a platform used to provide CME (continued medical education) to students in a wide array of medical case categories. It consists of two parts, the Reader, which is the viewer that students use to practice their CME and training, and the Writer, which allows medical professionals to write their own cases to be used in the Reader. I was brought on to assist with configuring an Oculus Rift prototype of Clinical Encounters to create an immersive experience between doctor & patient, along with setting up a dialogue text engine for use with the Alcohol, Obesity, and Pain training modules.
The first objective I was tasked with was creating a virtual reality prototype of a client/patient interaction. Clinical Tools wanted an immersive approach to CME, where the user would be in a doctor's body, progressing through a case with an animated 3D client. The main issue was how to incorporate large sets of branching dialogue and display it in virtual reality. The team had discussed using text-to-speech and mapping simple facial recognition to our models. The second objective was to improve the Reader, which had an abundance of case material created by the writing team.
I imported the Reader into a virtual 3D tablet that the doctor (player) could use to track the case and follow along. Then, I brought in a realistic model of a doctor's office along with several 3D patients. The last aspect I worked on was how we would incorporate the branching dialogue fluidly. The technology was still a little way off from full text-to-speech clarity. We knew it would arrive soon, but for now, we would need to create UI components to highlight key objectives of the case from the tablet, while displaying a log of past conversations between the client and patient.
I was then pulled away from the prototype to work on improving the Reader, which had an explosion of case material. I created UI/UX features primarily for the branching dialogue, which read in cases from XML files. Additionally, I created a 3D character creator so players could customize their avatar.
After my contract with Clinical Tools, they had planned to expand my VR work to the Oculus Go. Clinical Encounters currently utilizes aspects of my character creator and the UI/UX improvements I made to their dialogue engines for the Reader platform application. The Clinical Encounters Platform has expanded since I helped develop it to include new case material and is still utilized for CME/training for medical students.
