Psychomotor skills assessment in medical training based on virtual reality using a Weighted Possibilistic approach

Virtual reality has been used to provide training systems in several areas, particularly in medicine. In that area, user's interactions in a virtual environment are modeled and compared with predefined classes of performance to know how much users are prepared to perform that procedure on human beings. In this paper is proposed a new approach for online Single User's Assessment System (SUAS) using Weighted Possibility and Necessity measures. Those fuzzy measures provide an interval-based estimator to check the compatibility between interactions of an user and previous stored classes of performance. This approach integrates the kernel of a decision support system and it contributes to improve the user's assessment taking into account the individual relevance of variables in a procedure. It was verified in performance tests, when this new SUAS approach achieved better results, according to Kappa Coefficient, when compared with other previous approaches. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.