Conception of a Humanoid-Robot-Patient in Education to Train and Practice

This paper presents the concept and current work in progress of an humanoid robot patient for use in education for practicing and training medical diagnoses. Human robots are robots designed to imitate human movement and communication. We use the humanoid robot called Ameca developed by Engineered Arts. Ameca has a human-like conversation and can express many human-like facial expressions. The humanoid robot could provide an additional safe training environment in education where students can physically interact with a simulation patient and train on a variety of cases, while completely avoiding real patients exposure. Accordingly, the additional use of a humanoid robot in medical education can be expected to have a huge didactic benefit. The simulation concept for medical training is based on interdisciplinary cooperation in the fields of engineering, computer science and medicine according to the principles of user-centered design. We describe the fundamentals that are covered on the specific knowledge field, the capabilities of the robot and the planned use cases. We provide a description of the design of the system as well as the technology concepts leveraged.