How do you train people to talk to other people? For some professions, like nursing, communicating with others is a critical part of the job. Computer scientist Ben Lok developed software for nursing students to interview and examine a “virtual patient.” The patients speak like actual people, have backstories, and don’t necessarily share information easily. The son of a pipeline engineer and a nurse, Lok moved to the Tulsa from Malaysia when he was 5 years old. He credits his father’s prescient interest in computers - and an Atari game - with his career path. Lok’s company, Shadow Health, has plans to develop applications for other occupations that rely on face-to-face communication. This episode was originally released on January 2, 2019.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:21

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:38

Is treating patients like playing a video game and do virtual patients get us better nurses. Here to answer this question is Dr. Ben Lok, Professor in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Florida. Welcome, Ben.

Dr. Ben Lok: 0:49

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Richard Miles: 0:50

So Ben, we're going to talk about you in a minute. But first let's start by explaining what your technology or your invention is, what it does and what problem do you think it's solving?

Dr. Ben Lok: 1:01

All right. When we think about how do we train people to talk to other people. And we think about that. We've been working on that for a very long time and we still have the same technologies, the same approaches. We tend to do roleplaying with other people. And that's the way we've been doing it for hundreds of years. But now we've just entered this place where these computer technologies, these simulations where you can see these virtual people much like you see in a movie or a video game. Could we use them to help you practice talking to another person? It's kind of initially an interesting question. So it's not too different than let's say a flight simulator. But if you could practice your communication skills with these virtual people, would that translate to you talking to real people? And so that was a question we started thinking about back in 2004. So we've been thinking about this for a long time. We wanted to study the science behind it and really evaluate whether this was possible. And after about six, seven years, we worked with medical faculty. We worked with educators, we did a lot of user studies, which means we tested the technology out and really be able to understand that people, yeah, did learn how to communicate better using virtual people. Then we decided to form a company named Shadow Health and we said, can we bring this out to the masses? Can we get this rolled out into a lot of universities so we can be helping the new beginning nurse. Think of yourself as a nursing student just starting nursing school and you have to and learn how to talk to people. And so we said, hey, can simulation play a role here? That's what Shadow Health has now rolled out to lots of universities and colleges across the country. But the goal is again, talk to these virtual people and it'll help you become a better communicator.

Richard Miles: 2:28

So just so our listeners understand what exactly we're talking abou