Stockholm university

Research project Virtual Case System

This project deals with development and research about virtual cases for learning, training and assessment. The virtual cases can be used in various domains like medicine, nursing, psychiatry, psychology, teacher education, special needs education, law and social care.

Screenshot showing an example of a virtual case.
Screenshot showing an example of a virtual case.

Virtual cases are representations of encounters between a professional and another person where a real person can interact with a digitally visualized avatar. The purpose is to train the professional’s (clinician or student) decision making and reasoning skills.

In healthcare education, virtual case systems are already in use. When professionals – such as nurses, physicians, physiotherapists, psychologists and dentists – meet virtual patients, they get to practice their decision making in terms of diagnoses and/or treatments.

In other domains, virtual cases can help professionals in for example law (meeting clients), education (teachers dealing with pupils or parents) and social care (interacting with people in need of help).

This research project is focusing on the development of a completely new system where virtual cases can be developed, edited and run with ease by teachers or other educators without any need of programmers or technicians. A number of research studies are linked to the main project where learning outcomes, possibilities with digital assessment and other issues are investigated.

Project members

Project managers

Uno Fors

Researcher

Department of Computer and Systems Sciences

Members

Stefan Nenzén

Developer

Department of Computer and Systems Sciences

Martin Henkel

Docent

Department of Computer and Systems Sciences
Martin

Elenita Forsberg

Senior Lecturer

Högskolan i Halmstad

More about this project

This project is funded by grants from for example Region Stockholm, Halmstad University College and Stockholm University.

It is based on collaborations with numerous partners like Region Stockholm, Halmstad University College, Karolinska University Hospital and the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. This project is also linked to the digital health subprogram collaboration between Stockholm University and University of Rwanda, sponsored by Sida.

The development of the Virtual Case System is based on more than 30 years of experience from development and research around virtual cases and virtual patients for learning and assessment led by professor Uno Fors.

Previous projects and systems include Interactive Simulation of Patients (ISP), Children as next-of-kin (BSA-Sim, BivSim, BimSim), Refugee Trauma systems (RTS), reactions-on-Display (RoD, RoD-IDAP) and ToBeATeacher.