By Sabine Hildebrandt
Publication Date: 2026-02-04 19:03:00
Working with donated bodies has shaped anatomical knowledge and medical training for centuries.
Now, digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming education, and we can imagine a future where AI-generated representations of dead people – chatbots specifically designed as “Thanabots” – are used to support student learning.
The term Thanabot is derived from Thanatology, the study of death. Such AI replicas are already being used to support people during bereavement and could be integrated into medical training.
Thanabots, based on information and data from a body donor, could interact with students during dissections, provide personalized guidance from medical records, link medical history to anatomical findings, and improve factual learning.
They could even support the learner’s humanistic development through an intense first encounter with a dead body that comes “alive” through AI.
At this point, Thanabots remain hypothetical…
