Soul Machines Partners with Adtalem Global Education to Reimagine Health Care Career Development

Introducing Linda – a Digital Person with the ability to translate facial expressions, body language, and tone for enhanced health care education and training.
Soul Machines has partnered with Adtalem Global Education, a leading health care education company, to launch Linda, a Digital Person that reimagines health care career development. Linda translates facial expressions and body language to simulate a domestic abuse therapy patient, enabling students at Walden University to practice interactive patient counseling. With Linda, students can utilize their counseling and therapy skills in a safe environment that is more dynamic than traditional case studies or script-reading sessions. As an on-demand and easily repeatable exercise, students can practice multiple approaches with Linda in risk-free scenarios, allowing them to hone their skills while giving them the freedom to learn on their own terms.
Linda signifies an evolution in the creation and implementation of Digital People. While Soul Machines designed other iterations of Digital People to maintain a happy, positive demeanor for customer service roles, Linda exhibits a more complex range of human emotions such as sadness, grief, anger, anxiety, and fear. Her ability to interpret the facial expressions, body language, and tone of the student and react accordingly is a major development in the realm of empathetic artificial intelligence.
In this post-pandemic era, the education system has dramatically evolved. Digital People powered by Soul Machines will amplify the role of educators, rather than replace them. With Digital People for specialized subject areas, Adtalem can address hybrid learning for non-traditional learners and provide hands-on clinical work and adaptive training. Linda will provide students with support 24 hours a day, seven days a week – empowering everyone to learn at their own pace and on their own time to manage competing priorities in life.
“At Adtalem, we seek new ways to empower our institution’s students, so they are the best-prepared additions to the health care workforce. Linda represents a promising new resource for our counseling students to apply learnings with real-time feedback and develop emotional intelligence as the digital human reacts to their verbal and non-verbal cues,” said Steven Tom, Chief Customer Officer, Adtalem Global Education. “We plan to expand our use of Digital People in more programs across Adtalem’s institutions – such as medical and nursing diagnostics – so that we’re fostering greater job preparedness and improving compassionate care in the fast-growing and dynamic healthcare industry.”
Soul Machines’ portfolio of Digital People will enhance Adtalem’s ability to address the rapidly growing and unmet demand for healthcare professionals in the U.S. through a greater scale and a wider array of healthcare educational offerings. Like Linda, future Digital People will operate in an astonishingly lifelike way and can power empathetic engagement with students across cultures, languages, and geographic regions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Soul Machines and Adtalem share a vision of democratizing technology in higher education as well as bringing learning to the metaverse. Adtalem has tapped Soul Machines to continue to build autonomously animated Digital People to deploy throughout its portfolio of higher education institutions to enhance student learning and positively impact the industries they serve.
“The current healthcare system is in a state of crisis. However, Digital People are an important solution and are critical for an engaging online learning environment that will enable us to scale health care education,” said Greg Cross, co-founder, and CEO of Soul Machines. “We are proud to support Adtalem with a dedicated digital workforce tailored to educate learners of varying abilities and workstyles through autonomously powered empathetic interactions available across several languages at any given time.”
Adtalem joins other impressive brands pioneering the future of hyper-personalized user experiences in Education and Healthcare including The World Health Organization and The Pan American Health Organization, among other notable collaborators.
Press release updated on 9/16/2022 to remove inadvertently included enrollment data.