Take 5: Can Humans Learn From Robots? Janice Mark Says Yes

1. What is it, and where?

It's on the third floor of the School of Education building. We have four rooms, each one set up as a hospital room with a bed and a robotic patient called a simulation manikin, or SIM-man. We have a pregnant woman, two other adults, a child, and an infant. Each one is hooked up to a computer that enables students to feel pulses, check pupillary reflexes, watch the chest rise and fall, and listen to all the different body sounds. We can even cause a manikin to sweat and have seizures.

2. A maternity manikin?

Yes. She can actually give birth to a baby manikin right before the students' eyes. We can simulate a normal labor, a breech birth, an umbilical cord around the neck, and other medically challenging scenarios. And through a speaker built into this manikin, she can talk to the student, answer questions, and even scream during a contraction.

3. Why not just practice on humans?

Because if something goes wrong in a real hospital, the student gets pushed to the side and becomes just an observer. Here, in a safe learning environment, if a student gives the wrong medication, we can cause, through the computer, the manikin’s heart rate and breathing to drop, so the student has to figure out what to do next. This allows the student to develop clinical judgment and clinical thinking skills before they practice on real humans.

4. Is a student just watching something play out, or is there a human being behind all this?

There’s a human behind the manikin. Our simulation technician sits in a control room at the center of the four hospital rooms and is the actual voice of the patient, responding in real time to whatever the student says or does. The instructor sits right alongside and can coach the technician, deciding when to let a student struggle and when to step in.

5. Then what?

The students go into a conference room for what we call debriefing — to talk about what happened, what went well, what didn't. It's a little like reviewing game film: you get to watch yourself and figure out how to do better next time.