Advanced technologies in medical education

Information Communication Technologies (ICT) has revolutionized the practice and teaching of medicine. To address medical education and health problems, advanced ICT technologies are most desirable as articulated in the Millennium Development Goals of the UN. Advanced information technologies introduced in recent years have brought significant changes in education and practice of medicine and have taken medical education through substantial changes. Medical schools around the globe are investing heavily in advanced medical and eLearning technologies not only for delivery of education, but also to support health professionals. In this presentation existing advanced technologies and their role in medical education will be reviewed. This will include artificial intelligence, robotics technologies, the dynamic field of multimedia online medical education and social networking. Learning, especially in areas of science including medical science, engineering, and technology, involves affective interactions. eLearning systems would significantly improve student performance if they could adapt to the emotional state of the learner, for example if they could recognise when learners were confused, frustrated or not following, they could guide the learner to remedial action thereby improving the learning. Easy with Eve is an example of software that is capable of making such adaptation. Eve is well applicable to medical education. Eve is the result of pioneering work in the area of affective systems. Eve is the world’s first life like agent capable of detecting learners’ emotions and adapting to both learners’ emotions and learning. Eve is able to display emotions that a human tutor would display in a similar learning situation. Eve’s emotion expression is based on a casebased reasoning system developed through an observational study of human tutors conducted in New Zealand.This keynote will also present affect sensitive systems and how they can be applied to medical education and practice. Eve has now grown into Dr. Eve and has been utilized in the area of health and health education. Dr. Eve was used in helping diabetic children learn about their condition and how to manage it. Dr Eve is also embedded in a computer game for diabetic education. The game developed in 2D and 3D will be presented as a successful tool in educating children about diabetics. The inner workings of Dr. Eve and the latest developments including how it can detect the emotional state of the learner, synthesises and understands speech and translates will be presented. Advanced tools such as IBM’s Dr. Watson developed at IBM Watson centre and Dr. Eve developed at Unitec in New Zealand will be discussed and put in the context of medical education and practice.