Making Clinical Simulation Mannequins Talk

This paper advocates the interest of applying speech synthesis to clinical simulation mannequins, by focussing on a particular case study of recognised practical interest (evaluation of consciousness level based on the Glasgow Coma Scale), chosen as a proof of concept. A response repository comprising 109 sentences was recorded and an application was developed in Microsoft (R) Visual Basic (R) to allow configuration of the simulation scenario, control of response generation on a low-fidelity mannequin equipped with a loudspeaker and assessment of trainee performance. The system received very positive assessment in initial user tests on a typical training setting.