IDI Press Release – September 22, 2002

IDI Delivers 32 Virtual Dialogue Patients
for Use in Clinical Research Study

September 22, 2002 —  IDI program developers have delivered 32 voice-activated, virtual dialogue patients to a team of researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center.  The programs will be used in an NIH-sponsored, two-year study that will involve hundreds of primary care physicians throughout the country.   

IDI worked closely with the Georgetown project team during the development process to ensure that the medical content of the 32 programs was portrayed consistently and accurately.  The programs in this series blend speech recognition, digital video, and microprocessor technologies in a unique way that gives users an opportunity to conduct “face-to-face” interviews of the patients.  The study participants will use the programs on laptop computers, which the researchers take to the physician's office. 

Doctors who agree to take part in the study are asked to interact with a randomly assigned virtual patient.  Speaking into a microphone attached to the laptop, the physician asks the patient questions and the patient responds.  At the end of the virtual dialogue session, the physician is interviewed in depth by one of the researchers regarding the clinical decisions he or she would make for the patient.  The participants is also asked to evaluate this new approach to assessing clinical performance.  

As part of the project, IDI developed an administrative tool that allows the researchers to quickly activate the patient that has been randomly assigned from the library of 32 cases.  IDI also conducted a four-hour orientation session to train the researchers to administer the cases on the laptop.  To date there have been no calls for technical support, and the researchers report that over 100 physicians have participated.  Four months of intensive development were required to complete the virtual dialogue programs. 

The results of the study will be published in the medical literature after the research is completed in 2004.   

About IDI

IDI has been creating voice-activated interactive video simulations since 1984. The company's founders began this research and development at the National Library of Medicine’s Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. Subsequent R&D has been funded by SBIR grants and contracts from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and DARPA.

The educational effectiveness of the virtual dialogue method has been validated repeatedly in rigorous scientific experiments funded by these agencies. In 1991, IDI was awarded U.S. Patent No. 5,006,987 to protect this unique method of dialogue with a virtual human subject. Subsequently, IDI developed a dynamic, intelligent prompting system to help users conduct a focused and informative dialogue with Virtual Conversations® characters. In 1997, U.S. Patent No. 5,730,603 was awarded to protect the intelligent prompting method. A third patent is pending.

 For More Information Contact:

Marcia A. Zier
Interactive Drama Inc.
7900 Wisconsin Avenue Suite 200, Bethesda, MD 20814
Tel: 301.654.0676
FAX: 301.657.9174
Email: mzier@idrama.com