Development of Voice Dialogue System for Simulated Patient and Detection of Interviewer’s Nod

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to realize a medical interview training system in which an android robot is employed as a simulated patient to provide consistent training and to provide a quantitative evaluation to medical students. In this study, we first analyzed the medical interview by medical doctors. Then we implemented a simple algorithm to classify interviewer's utterance into question and non-question. In addition, we developed a detection algorithm of interviewer’s nod to evaluate interviewer’s non-verbal behavior. The result indicates that our conversation system can automatically conduct medical interview and evaluate interviewer’s nod.