2026. Caladrius 2.0: Continuing Development of a Virtual Patient Supporting the Conduct of Medical Interviews.

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Hannah Baniqued

Project Summary

From 2024 to 2025, ASMPH, ALLS, and the VAMR laboratories collaborated to design and develop a mixed-reality application with conversational abilities for use of medical students to practice their medical interview skills. The initiative resulted into Caladrius, a working virtual patient (VP) with a text-only mode and a an audio mode that is ready for classroom use in September 2025. An additional outcome was the publication of three international Scopus-indexed papers: one long conference paper and two short conference papers.Based on the feedback of the ASMPH doctors, the audience during these conference presentations, and field testers, the research team has assembled a list of improvements that it hopes to make on Caladrius over the next year.

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2026. The Political Dynasty Playbook for Araling Panlipunan Grade 10. Arete Sandbox Grant. With Anne Candelaria, Joi Marie Indias, and Angelo Espiritu

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Hannah Baniqued

Project Summary

The Political Dynasty Playbook for Araling Panlipunan Grade 10 responds to persistent challenges in civic education, where complex political concepts are difficult to teach, instructional materials are scarce, and student engagement remains low. Anchored in the Revised K to 10 Curriculum, the project addresses political dynasty as a key issue linked to inequality, poverty, and democratic participation by using game-based learning to make abstract concepts concrete and relevant. Developed through a collaborative, human-centered design process, the Playbook integrates insights from political science, education policy, learning sciences, and educational game design to support both teachers and learners. The result is a self-contained, adaptable toolkit—complete with games, guides, assessments, and debriefing tools—that enables active, critical, and meaningful learning about political participation and democratic life.

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2022-2023. Student Utilization of Canvas Across Different Modalities of Learning, URC

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Hannah Baniqued

Project Summary

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ateneo de Manila, along with all other educational institutions across the world, was forced to shift from face-to-face instruction to online delivery through the use of a learning management system (LMS). The shift offered the university a unique opportunity to study student and teacher behaviors by analyzing LMS usage data. When and how often students accessed an LMS, which resources they used, how quickly they submitted assignments, and how they participated in online discussion forums offered proxy indicators of engagement with the subject matter, the teacher, and fellow students. Prior work on Ateneo LMS data examined the changes in student online learning participation following Typhoons Goni and Vamco in 2020 (Lagmay & Rodrigo, 2021) and a social network analysis of student discussion postings (Lagmay & Rodrigo, under review). At this point, the university is again at a transitional period. Classes are migrating slowly from online mode to face-to-face. During this time, we offer students and teachers choices in modalities: Face-to-face, Hybrid, Flex, and Fully Online. It will be interesting to see how these different modalities affect the extent to which our LMS are used.

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2024-2025. VR Technology Development Program for ASMPH (Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health)

Posted on July 5, 2026 by Hannah Baniqued

Project Summary

Project Caladrius is a generative AI-powered virtual patient system developed at Ateneo de Manila University to support medical history-taking practice in Philippine medical schools. While initial evaluations demonstrated that the text-based interface was sufficiently usable, user testing revealed a notable limitation: the virtual patients lacked personality distinctiveness. Specifically, patients across different personality types — neutral, talkative, and aggressive — appeared too similar in character, and the aggressive personality in particular was difficult to trigger. This proposal identifies personality distinctiveness as a critical gap in the current implementation and proposes a three-part solution: (1) replacing the underlying language model with a newer, more capable model; (2) implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) using a vector database to more efficiently surface relevant patient information while preserving the model’s instruction-following capacity; and (3) redesigning the system prompts to more precisely encode personality-specific behaviors. Together, these improvements are expected to produce more realistic, distinguishable patient characters that better simulate the variety of patients a medical student would encounter in clinical practice.

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Digital Materials To Prevent Bullying

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Hannah Baniqued

In this project spearheaded by Dr. Regina Hechanova in partnership with the Department of Education, we aim to develop digital materials on bullying prevention. Using a human-centered design process, multi-disciplinal teams if college students will work with public school students in ideating, prototyping and evaluating tools that can be used in making our schools safer and more inclusive.

Link to the following:

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