Catherine Zanbaka Nicolas
Virtual Human Applications
Digital Patient for Triage Nurse Training
The purpose of this project is to offer more realistic training for nurses working in the triage unit. The nurse can better acquire and practice interview and assessment skills essential for working in triage. The nurse verbally conducts interview with patient, observes, examines, and diagnoses. The Digital Patient uses speech recognition interface with natural language processing to create more natural conversation between the Digital Patient and the student nurse.
Figure 1: Screenshot of Digital Patient with chicken pox
Figure 2: Participant interacting with digital patient
PublicationsZiemkiewicz, C., Ulinski, A., Zanbaka, C., Hardin, S., Hodges, L. F. (2005). "Interactive Digital Patient for Triage Nurse Training." First International Conference on Virtual Reality, Las Vegas, Nevada 22 - 27 July. PDF
Shakespearean Karaoke!
Traditionally, students learn about plays by reading them from books. However, reading dialogue on paper does not well communicate the various emotions and actions that help people understand the significance of person-to-person interactions.
We have designed and implemented an application that allows a user to act out a part of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing with a virtual human. The user reads their line from the bottom of the screen, and the virtual human responds with her line, using appropriate gestures and emotions.
The purpose of this experiment is to measure the effectiveness of learning about a play by interacting with a virtual human, versus learning about the play by reading its text. Our hypothesis is that interacting with the virtual character will lead to a better understanding of the play, or, at the least, will be more enjoyable for participants than the traditional text approach.
Figure 1: Screenshot of Beatrice
Figure 2: Screenshot of Beatrice
PublicationsCairco, L., Babu, S., Ulinski, A., Zanbaka, C., and Hodges, L. F. 2007. Shakespearean karaoke. In Proceedings of the 2007 ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, S. N. Spencer, Ed. VRST '07. ACM, New York, NY, 239-240.
Virtual Human Physiotherapist Framework for Personalized Training and Rehabilitation
We present a framework that employs a Virtual Human Physiotherapist (VHP) towards personalized training and rehabilitation. The VHP is an inexpensive alternative to training with a real person. Using a virtual human for training allows the user to train on their own schedule and in the privacy of their own homes. In addition, the gender, race and age of the virtual human can be altered to match the needs of the user, making the user more comfortable in interacting with the VHP. Finally, the VHP provides a uniform and accurate training experience. Unlike real people, virtual humans are not affected by "having a bad day?" or being tired. The VHP is always happy and ready to assist the user in training for a particular exercise. There is also no limit on the amount times the user can repeat an exercise.
PublicationsS. Babu, C. Zanbaka, J. Jackson, T-O. Chung, B. Lok, M. C. Shin, and L. F. Hodges (2005). "Virtual Human Physiotherapist Framework for Personalized Training and Rehabilitation," In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2005, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, May 9 - 11, 2005. PDF
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