DOCTOR’S ORDER!: MAPPING AND REIMAGINING MEDICAL COMMUNICATION TRAINING THROUGH AI-AUGMENTED REVIEW AND SERIOUS GAMING

The aim of this paper is to present the serious game Doctor's Order! that is currently being developed by our research team at the University of Parma. The videogame is, of course, based on the latest seminal developments in Artificial Intelligence in the field of natural language processing, related to large language models and generative AI (Vaswani et al. 2017). The goal is to improve users' communication skills and present technical terms in plain language, helping players to understand and communicate technical concepts in an understandable way. Indeed, as critical linguists (Wodak 1997, among others) have repeatedly pointed out, for decades physicians have tended to use a depersonalizing language, and patients - as well as their caregivers - have often felt left in the dark about their conditions and the treatments they would undergo. However, with the advent of the medical humanities, issues of accessibility and communication in the medical field have become critical. A serious game such as the one presented here thus represents a new tool for addressing the challenges of contemporary society. The ubiquity of videogames in everyday life (Özçetin et al. 2019) allows gamification to reach a wide variety of users, thereby enhancing their experience of medical language, arousing and sustaining their interest (Bellotti et al. 2016), and enabling them to develop communication skills that will prove fundamental throughout their lives, regardless of the role they play (patient, student, health professional). Therefore, after a general introduction to the videogame and its target users, this paper will describe some of its main features, focusing on the different linguistic and cultural issues that it focuses on and that AI can help bring to the forefront (e.g., intelligibility, political correctness, politeness). The presentation will conclude with a short demonstration of how the game works. References - Bellotti, F.; Kapralos, B.; Lee, K. et al. (2013). Assessment in and of serious games. Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 1-11. - Özçetin, M.; Gümüştaş, F.; Çaǧ, Y. et al. (2019). The relationships between videogame experience and cognitive abilities in adolescents. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 15, 1171-80. - Vaswani, A.; Shazeer, N.; Parmar, N. et al. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30. - Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis and the study of doctor–patient interaction. In B.L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell & B. Nordberg (Eds), The construction of professional discourse (pp. 173-200). Longman.