Development of Mobile Applications for Medical Education

Overview

This project aims to create tools for independent learning for medical students. The apps will not replace existing clinical teaching and medicalcommunication skills courses. Rather, they will be used to augment them. The observational skills app will help to address a need that is currently largely ignored. The appointment with the doctor app will allow students to apply the knowledge accrued through reading and didactic lectures, by tasking them to interpret clinical signs and investigations. The scenarios in the app will be realistic, in that virtual patients will present with complaints/symptoms that will require students to tease out the facts of the case. Any new information gleaned as the scenario evolves will require that the students mull over the facts and react accordingly. At present, interpretation of clinical signs and investigations are assessed only in small-group bedside tutorials, end-of-posting clinical tests and high-stakes end-of-year examinations. The medcomms and presentation game apps will allow medical students and postgraduate medical trainees to practise the soft skills of effective inter-professional and doctor-patient communication skills on their own time, and will allow students to learn from each other. Although such skills are emphasized in medical school, and are acknowledged to be important by trainee doctors preparing for examinations, no such learning tool is currently available. The residency game app will allow medical students preparing for student internship programmes to practise the skills necessary to function as a junior doctor on wards. All these apps, save the observational skills app, have been piloted as online games hosted on IVLE, in the last 10 years, and have been deemed to be effective by the students.