Which do you feel comfortable, interview by a real doctor or by a virtual doctor? A comparative study of responses to inquiries with various psychological intensities, for the development of the Hyper Hospital

The "Hyper Hospital" is a novel medical care system which will be constructed on an electronic information network. The human interface of the Hyper Hospital based on the modern virtual reality technology is expected to maximally enhance patients' ability of healing illness by computer-supported online visual consultations. In order to investigate the effects and features of online visual consultations in the Hyper Hospital, we conducted an experiment to clarify the influence of electronic interviews on the talking behavior of interviewees in the similar context to real doctor-patient interactions. Four types of distant-confrontation interviews were presented to voluntary subjects and their verbal and nonverbal responses were analyzed from the human ethological viewpoints. In the media-mediated interviews both the latency and the duration of interviewees' utterances in answering questions increased compared with those of live face to face interviews. These results suggest that the interviewee became more verbose or talkative in the mediated interviews, but his psychological tension was generally augmented.<>