SimulAItients - an AI-supported, text-based learning format to promote clinical decision-making

With the AI-supported learning format SimulAItients, we are developing an innovative tool for training medical decision-making ("clinical reasoning") and clinical skills. Using dialogue-based, text-controlled patient avatars, SimulAItients enables individual training that is independent of time and location.

The classic training principle of "see one - do one - teach one" is increasingly reaching its limits in today's medical teaching: In view of scarce clinical resources and limited patient availability, high-quality practical training is difficult to implement across the board and in a standardised manner. People with disabilities are particularly affected, as they are rarely represented in medical training - for example due to organisational hurdles or ethical uncertainties.

Yet they have an equal right to accessible and competent medical care. In order to fulfil this right, medical students must learn how to treat this patient group professionally and respectfully at an early stage. Communicating with people with disabilities requires additional skills that go beyond regular anamnesis - such as knowledge of assisted communication, sensitivity to non-verbal signals or dealing with relatives or legal carers.

With the AI-supported learning format SimulAItients, we are developing an innovative tool for training medical decision-making ("clinical reasoning") and clinical skills. Using dialogue-based, text-controlled patient avatars, SimulAItients enables time- and location-independent, individual training - supplemented by structured AI-supported debriefing.

As part of the requested funding, we want to specifically integrate people with disabilities into the tool - through realistic simulations of various forms of disability (e.g. cognitive, physical, psychological), specific communication scenarios including external anamnesis by relatives and improved accessibility (e.g. screen reader, simple language, keyboard navigation). Didactically, SimulAItients is based on principles such as interactivity, self-direction and feedback. It not only promotes clinical knowledge, but also empathic and discrimination-sensitive behavioural skills. SimulAItients can be used on a modular basis, is interprofessionally compatible and contributes to the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in medical education. Because SimulAItients has a modular structure and is interprofessionally compatible, it can also be transferred to other health and social professions in the future. This means that the project not only contributes to the further development of medical teaching, but also serves as a model for digitally inclusive training in the healthcare sector. SimulAItients contributes to equal opportunities in medical education and is explicitly aimed at a diverse student body.