AI-Assisted Triage Simulation: Effects on Performance, Workload, and Verbal Behavior
Citations
Abstract
This thesis examines whether AI assistance improves student performance in medical triage simulation training. Thirteen students completed three disaster scenarios twice each (76 simulator sessions). Six had a multimodal AI assistant that could see the simulator screen and answer spoken questions; seven controls narrated reasoning aloud without AI. Both groups improved significantly in score and accuracy (p < .05). Performance did not differ by condition (p = .98), indicating no added benefit from AI beyond practice, though the small sample size (n = 13) limits the power to detect such effects. The AI group reported higher subjective workload (d = 1.02, p = .11). Controls produced nearly twice as many question-like utterances per round (p = .18). The AI assistant ran on a custom multimodal AI pipeline connecting to OpenAI's Realtime API, grounded in triage protocols via retrieval-augmented generation and built to support multiple concurrent sessions.
