As robots become more and more sophisticated, they are being used in increasingly inventive ways, which include helping combat loneliness and helping older people take care of themselves.
Now, research published in Pain Research and Management under the title “Socially-Assistive Robots Using Empathy to Reduce Pain and Distress during Peripheral IV Placement in Children” reports on ways that robots can help children too, specifically with managing the pain and distress associated with medical procedures.
Although previous studies have used robots to distract children during medical procedures, even using a robotic seal to allay medical fears, this study is one of the first to use robots programmed with empathy to create more meaningful robot-human interactions.
The study involved 31 children who were attending the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for intravenous (IV) catheter placement. This can be a painful procedure, but one that is necessary to facilitate the delivery of sedatives and analgesics. During the procedure, some of the children interacted with ‘IVEY’, a 3D-printed, socially assistive robot. IVEY either distracted the child by playing a tablet-based game or offered empathy through scripted verbal responses (tailored to the level of fear or pain the child reported).
The children who interacted with the empathic robot reported having less fear before and after the procedure, and even that the empathic robot made the catheter placement hurt less.
On the basis of these promising findings, the researchers plan to trial socially assistive robots for other medical procedures. They say that, in the future, robots like this could be used to help patients transition between hospital and home by continuing to provide support beyond the hospital bed.
Read the full article here >>
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). Illustration by David Jury.