Non-Verbal behaviors analysis of healthcare professionals engaged with a Virtual-Patient

Virtual-Patients (VP) are currently developed to train healthcare professionals in several domains. In this paper, we specifically explore non-verbal behaviors of healthcare professionals engaged in an interaction with a VP that displays a neurodegenerative disease. The main motivation is to contribute to the training of healthcare professionals with a focus on non-verbal behaviors, which are known to play an important role in patient- caregivers interaction. Our paper presents the VirtuAlZ corpus which is a video corpus of 29 professional caregivers interacting with a VP. Based on the literature and exploratory studies, we developed an architecture able to perceive a list of non-verbal signals, which are then transformed in discrete symbols. An N-gram based approach is then exploited to model, analyze and compare healthcare professional strategies. In particular, we report analysis on the work experience context and we cluster the participants in order to understand the different patterns of behavior present in our corpus.