Speaker: Laurel Riek, University of Notre Dame
Title: Facing Healthcare’s Future: Designing Facial Expressivity for Robotic Patient Mannequins

Abstract:

In the United States, there are an estimated 98,000 people per year killed and $17.1 billion dollars lost due to medical errors. One way to prevent these errors is to have clinical students engage in simulation-based medical education, to help move the learning curve away from the patient. This training often takes place on human-sized android robots, called high-fidelity patient simulators (HFPS), which are capable of conveying human-like physiological cues (e.g., respiration, heart rate). Training with them can include anything from diagnostic skills (e.g., recognizing sepsis, a failure that recently killed 12-year-old Rory Staunton) to procedural skills (e.g., IV insertion) to communication skills (e.g., breaking bad news). HFPS systems allow students a chance to safely make mistakes within a simulation context without harming real patients, with the goal that these skills will ultimately be transferable to real patients.

While simulator use is a step in the right direction toward safer healthcare, one major challenge and critical technology gap is that none of the commercially available HFPS systems exhibit facial expressions, gaze, or realistic mouth movements, despite the vital importance of these cues in helping providers assess and treat patients. This is a critical omission, because almost all areas of health care involve face-to-face interaction, and there is overwhelming evidence that providers who are skilled at decoding communication cues are better healthcare providers – they have improved outcomes, higher compliance, greater safety, higher satisfaction, and they experience fewer malpractice lawsuits. In fact, communication errors are the leading cause of avoidable patient harm in the US: they are the root cause of 70% of sentinel events, 75% of which lead to a patient dying.

In the Robotics, Health, and Communication (RHC) Lab at the University of Notre Dame, we are addressing this problem by leveraging our expertise in android robotics and social signal processing to design and build a new, facially expressive, interactive HFPS system. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to date, including: in situ observational studies exploring how individuals, teams, and operators interact with existing HFPS technology; design-focused interviews with simulation center directors and educators which future HFPS systems are envisioned; and initial software prototyping efforts incorporating novel facial expression synthesis techniques.

Biography:

Dr. Laurel Riek is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. She directs the RHC Lab, and leads research on human-robot interaction, social signal processing, facial expression synthesis, and clinical communication. She received her PhD at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and prior to that worked for eight years as a Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer and Roboticist at MITRE.

Speaker: Helen Purchase, University of Glasgow
Title: An Exploration of Interface Visual Aesthetics
Abstract:
The visual design of an interface is not merely an ‘add-on’ to the functionality provided by a system: it is well-known that it can affect user preference, engagement and motivation, but does it have any effect on user performance? Can the efficiency or effectiveness of a system be improved by its visual design? This seminar will report on experiments that investigate whether any such effect can be quantified and tested. Key to this question is the definition of an unambiguous, quantifiable characterisation of an interface’s ‘visual aesthetic’: ways in which this could be determined will be discussed.

About Helen:
Dr Helen Purchase is Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. She has worked in the area of empirical studies of graph layout for several years, and also has research interests in visual aesthetics, task-based empirical design, collaborative learning in higher education, and sketch tools for design. She is currently writing a book on empirical methods for HCI research.