Know the old joke that busy people tell about wishing they could clone themselves? Dr. Leslie Saxon, director of the Center for Body Computing at the University of Southern California, is doing that, almost.
“We’re developing an army of virtual doctors,” Saxon told MedCity News in a meeting at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies, on a former Hughes Aircraft site in Playa Vista, a Los Angeles neighborhood that’s part of an area known as “Silicon Beach.” The institute created a virtual representation of Saxon that even she admitted looks surprisingly real. (The human version is on the right in this short video.)
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“I could be doing a procedure and a virtual me could be taking a history,” said Saxon, chief of cardiovascular medicine at USC Keck School of Medicine.
Patients can autonomously answer questions without feeling like they are pressuring their doctors. “I feel like we are getting better information,” Saxon said. “We don’t want patients to feel ashamed or inhibited.”
USC is testing the technology with soldiers and veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; the Institute for Creative Technologies is a U.S. Army contractor. Saxon said that research has suggested that those with PTSD tend to disclose more about themselves to computers – including automated medical history forms – than to busy physicians that patients don’t want to be perceived as a burden to.
In addition to the virtual Saxon, the institute has created stock characters to fit every demographic — young and old, male and female, various ethnicities — in hopes of giving each patient someone they can relate to. “It scales us all over the world,” Saxon said.
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The Institute for Creative Technology, which specializes in building virtual worlds, has long been developing training and simulation tools for the Army. A former employee, Palmer Luckey, now 22, went on to found Oculus VR, which Facebook bought last year for $2 billion. The institute also works with the USC School of Cinematic Arts, another frequent collaborator for Saxon, whose brother, Edward Saxon, won an Oscar as a producer of “Silence of the Lambs.”
Video is becoming an important part of what the Center for Body Computing is doing.
“Another thing that we think is missing from care is really good information that’s short and easy to understand,” Saxon said. “Medicine is a bunch of deep verticals,” Saxon said. That demands personalized content.
Video can fill that need nicely. For example, Saxon explained that diabetes outcomes have been directly linked to diet; it is especially important to keep a constant source of carbohydrates in the bloodstream.
In 2013, YouTube star chef Dani Spears made a video for the Center for Body Computing to help people with diabetes make healthy, simple meals at home using brown rice as a base. It’s been viewed more than 65,000 times to date.
In other news, Saxon said that about 2,500 people have enrolled in Center for Body Computing clinical trials. Two weeks from now at the Heart Rhythm Society‘s annual meeting in Boston, Saxon will report preliminary results on a study with 1,600 patients using AliveCor‘s smartphone-based ECG that kicked off in October 2013.