Reducing the effort in the creation of new patients using the virtual simulated patient framework.

The use of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) in the primary health care educational field is rare, although it has been demonstrated that it has advantages over traditional learning processes. This is due to the high production and maintenance costs of creating a specific ECA for some domain. In this paper we describe a methodology to reduce the effort of creating virtual patients inside the virtual simulated patient framework. This framework is an ECA adapted to simulate a sick patient during an appointment with a primary health care doctor. In order to do it, the system separates patient´s physical conditions and personal features, i.e. with the diseases they have, their personality or cultural level from the patient´s behaviour. The modeling of physical conditions makes use of fuzzy aggregation functions and the behaviour of the patient employ a fuzzy rule based system to control the subjectivity associated to their personality. The advantage of this approach is that many different patients can be created without effort just creating the physical models that represent them and their behaviour are in accordance with the illnesses they suffer from and their personality.