EQClinic: an online platform for learning communication skills in clinical consultations

Doctors’ communication skills have an impact on patients’ health outcomes, so it is important for medical students to develop these skills. Current communication skills training normally provides face-to-face practice consultations and manually analysed feedback of verbal and nonverbal communication for students, however the main challenge of these methods is the extensive needs of human and financial resources. In the past two decades, we have witnessed a dramatic improvement in technologies such as video conferencing, computer vision and affective computing, and these new technologies provide solutions to deal with the challenges on the training of clinical communication skills. This thesis presents an online training platform EQClinic to improve medical students’ clinical communication skills. EQClinic utilises the new technologies to enable medical students and simulated patients to have video conferencing consultations, and provide human assessment and feedback, and computer-generated nonverbal behaviour feedback for students to reflect on. EQClinic has been evaluated through different user studies reported in this thesis. The important evaluation results showed that medical students’ overall communication skills were improved through using EQClinic. EQClinic has been successfully incorporated into the communication skills teaching curriculum of two Australian Universities. In addition, medical students’ nonverbal behaviour is analysed to investigate the influences of the culture background and gender differences in video consultations. Communication skills are essential to many professions, not just medicine. The potential impact of EQClinic and the findings of this thesis are not limited to medical education. Many professionals, who need communication skills training, could be benefited from using of EQClinic