AI-driven patient avatar for physiotherapy education

The project will develop an AI-based patient avatar that allows physiotherapy students to practice professional communication skills early in their studies and create an implementation strategy for its use in physiotherapy education.

Co-creation, through workshops and prototype testing, is central to the project and is combined with agile software development.

The project integrates expertise in physiotherapy, data science, and health technology to develop a language-model-based patient avatar that enhances physiotherapy students’ communication and patient history-taking skills early in their studies.

The goal is to develop both the patient avatar and an implementation strategy for integration into the physiotherapy program.

The development of an AI-based patient avatar is driven by co-creation between

• students and educators from the physiotherapy program at the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Health Technology (RHT)
• IT students from the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design (TKD)
• patient representatives, and researchers from RHT and TKD, affiliated with the Centre for Intelligent Musculoskeletal Health (CIM) at OsloMet