Enhancing doctor-patient communication in surgical explanations: Designing effective facial expressions and gestures for animated physician characters

Abstract

Paying close attention to facial expressions, gestures, and communication techniques is essential when creating animated physician characters that are realistic and captivating when describing surgical procedures. This paper emphasizes the integration of appropriate emotions, co-speech gestures when medical experts explain the medical procedure, and designing animated characters. We can achieve healthy doctor-patient relationships and improvement of patients' understanding by depicting these components truthfully. We suggest two critical approaches to developing virtual medical experts by incorporating these elements. First, doctors can generate the contents of the surgical procedure with a virtual doctor. Second, patients can listen to the surgical procedure described by the virtual doctor and ask if they have any questions. Our system helps patients by considering their psychology and adding medical professionals' opinions. These improvements ensure the animated virtual agent is comforting, reassuring, and emotionally supportive. Through a user study, we evaluated our hypothesis and gained insight into improvements.