Vocal Pain Expression Augmentation to Improve Interaction Accuracy in Virtual Robopatient

Palpation is a method used by physicians to physically examine patients using fingers or hands to diagnose any disease or illness. Vocal pain expressions of the patient during palpation are considered important feedback to assess the conditions. Although recent technological advances have enabled the development of medical simulators for physicians to train the palpation procedures, incorporating vocal pain expressions into these simulators has been understudied. In this paper, we present a vocal pain expression augmentation for a robopatient to be used in abdominal palpation training. Our virtual robopatient builds upon a virtual abdomen and a face that can render facial pain expressions together with vocal pain expressions. In a user study (N=26), we test the vocal pain augmented virtual robopatient against a system without vocal pain expressions in a palpation task to estimate the maximum pain point within the virtual abdomen. We demonstrate that the vocal pain augmented virtual robopatient leads to statistically significant improvements in localizing the maximum pain without compromising the position estimation time.