Radiation Oncology/Patient Robot Interactions

Patient - Robot Interactions

Frameworks

• Karel Capek (1920) - Rossum's Universal Robots ([w:R.U.R.|Wikipedia link])
  • Origin of the word 'robot' used in a play, where artificial people (roboti) are created. Initially happy to work for humans, eventually there is a hostile rebellion, and extinction of human race, and beginning of something new ...

• Asimov (1942) -- Three Laws of Robotics
  • 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
  • 2) A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law
  • 3) A robot must protect its existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

• Stefan Schaal, University of Southern California (2007) Paper link
  • 1) Action: motor control
  • 2) Interaction: human-robot or robot-robot interactions to accomplish a goal
  • 3) Engagement: cognitive and psychological aspects of interaction

• European ACCOMPANY robotic care project
  • 1) Autonomy: being able to set goals in life and choose means
  • 2) Independence: being able to implement one’s goals without the permission, assistance or material resources of others
  • 3) Enablement: having, or having access to, the means of realizing goals and choices
  • 4) Safety: being able readily to avoid pain or harm
  • 5) Privacy: being able to pursue and realize one’s goals and implement one’s choices unobserved
  • 6) Social connectedness: having regular contact with friends and loved ones and safe access to strangers one can choose to meet

Literature

• Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain; 2021 PMID 34574861 -- "Robots in Healthcare? What Patients Say" (Valles-Peris N, Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Sep 21;18(18):9933. Paper link
  • Interviews using online platforms. 13 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. None of the patients interacted with any robots they knew about during their stay
  • Variety of opinions. Patients preferred health care interactions with real people. However, ok to introduce robots for some caregiving tasks
    • "Well being perspective" - robots lack properties that are considered indispensable to 'good care', such as smile, touch, empathy, etc and thus are not appropriate in this domain
    • "Responsibility perspective" - robots are ok to automate tasks of the 'health system', such as scheduling, queueing, etc particularly during COVID pandemic when humans were overloaded

• Tufts University
  • 2021 PMID 32421077 -- "Assistive Robots for the Social Management of Health: A Framework for Robot Design and Human-Robot Interaction Research" (Chita-Tegmark M, Int J Soc Robot. 2021;13(2):197-217.)
    • Framework for socially assistive robots interacting with people with health conditions, in terms of (a) changing how the person is perceived, (b) enhancing the social behavior of the person, (c) modifying the social behavior of others, (d) providing structure for interactions, and (e) changing how the person feels
  • 2019 PMID 31199297 -- "Effects of Assistive Robot Behavior on Impressions of Patient Psychological Attributes: Vignette-Based Human-Robot Interaction Study" (Chita-Tegmark M, J Med Internet Res. 2019 May 19;21(6):e13729.) Paper link
    • Interviews using vignettes about behaviors of assistive robots (patient-centered vs task-centered). 180 participants, using Amazon Mechanical Turk platform
    • Scenarios describing robot actions as patient-centered ("It is difficult for the patient to observe the treatment plan") vs task-centered ("The patient shows high levels of treatment non-compliance") were perceived as robots having higher emotional intelligence (EI) but also caused people to form more positive impression of the patient (SS). However, no impact on trust of the robot or acceptance of the robot, when it behaved in a task-centered way
    • Conclusion: Robots could be used to enhance human-human relationships in the health care context