Search

Effective communication between a clinician and their patient is critical for delivering healthcare maximizing outcomes. Unfortunately, traditional communication training approaches that use human standardized patients and expert coaches are difficult to scale. Here, we present the development and validation of a scalable, easily accessible, digital tool known as the Standardized Online Patient for Health Interaction Education (SOPHIE) for practicing and receiving feedback on doctor-patient communication skills. SOPHIE was validated by conducting an experiment with 30 participants. We found that participants who underwent SOPHIE performed significantly better than the control in overall communication, aggregate scores, empowering the patient, and showing empathy ($p < 0.05$ in all cases). One day, we hope that SOPHIE will help make communication training resources more accessible by providing a scalable option to supplement existing resources., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

With online shopping gaining massive popularity over the past few years, e-commerce platforms can play a significant role in tackling climate change and other environmental problems. In this study, we report that the "attitude-behavior" gap identified by prior sustainable consumption literature also exists in an online setting. We propose SEER, a concept design for online shopping websites to help consumers make more sustainable choices. We introduce explainable environmental impact ratings to increase knowledge, trust, and convenience for consumers willing to purchase eco-friendly products. In our quasi-randomized case-control experiment with 98 subjects across the United States, we found that the case group using SEER demonstrates significantly more eco-friendly consumption behavior than the control group using a traditional e-commerce setting. While there are challenges in generating reliable explanations and environmental ratings for products, if implemented, in the United States alone, SEER has the potential to reduce approximately 2.88 million tonnes of carbon emission every year.

A schema-guided approach to dialogue management has been shown in recent work to be effective in creating robust customizable virtual agents capable of acting as friendly peers or task assistants. However, successful applications of these methods in open-ended, mixed-initiative domains remain elusive -- particularly within medical domains such as virtual standardized patients, where such complex interactions are commonplace -- and require more extensive and flexible dialogue management capabilities than previous systems provide. In this paper, we describe a general-purpose schema-guided dialogue management framework used to develop SOPHIE, a virtual standardized cancer patient that allows a doctor to conveniently practice for interactions with patients. We conduct a crowdsourced evaluation of conversations between medical students and SOPHIE. Our agent is judged to produce responses that are natural, emotionally appropriate, and consistent with her role as a cancer patient. Furthermore, it significantly outperforms an end-to-end neural model fine-tuned on a human standardized patient corpus, attesting to the advantages of a schema-guided approach.

Computer mediated conversations (e.g., videoconferencing) is now the new mainstream media. How would credibility be impacted if one could change their race on the fly in these environments? We propose an approach using Deepfakes and a supporting GAN architecture to isolate visual features and alter racial perception. We then crowd-sourced over 800 survey responses to measure how credibility was influenced by changing the perceived race. We evaluate the effect of showing a still image of a Black person versus a still image of a White person using the same audio clip for each survey. We also test the effect of showing either an original video or an altered video where the appearance of the person in the original video is modified to appear more White. We measure credibility as the percent of participant responses who believed the speaker was telling the truth. We found that changing the race of a person in a static image has negligible impact on credibility. However, the same manipulation of race on a video increases credibility significantly (61\% to 73\% with p $<$ 0.05). Furthermore, a VADER sentiment analysis over the free response survey questions reveals that more positive sentiment is used to justify the credibility of a White individual in a video., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures