A Feasibility Study of a Social Robot Collecting Patient Reported Outcome Measurements from Older Adults

Mark Neerincx,Roel Boumans,Marcel Olde Rikkert,Koen Hindriks,Fokke Van Meulen

doi:10.1007/s12369-019-00561-8

Abstract

Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) are an essential means for collecting information on the effectiveness of hospital care as perceived by the patients themselves. Especially older adult patients often require help from nursing staff to successfully complete PROMs, but this staff already has a high work load. Therefore, a social robot is introduced to perform the PROM questioning and recording task. The study objective was to design a multimodal dialogue for a social robot to acquire PROMs for older patients. The primary outcomes were the effectiveness, the efficiency, and the subjective usability as perceived by older adults of acquiring PROMs by a social robot. The robot dialogue design included a personalized welcome, PROM questions, confirmation requests, affective statements, use of a support screen on the robot displaying the answer options, and accompanying robot gestures. The design was tested in a crossover study with 31 community-dwelling persons aged 70 years or above. Answers obtained with the robot were compared with those obtained by a questionnaire taken by humans. First results indicated that PROM data collection in older persons may be carried out effectively and efficiently by a social robot. The robot’s subjective usability was on average scored as 80.1 (± 11.6) on a scale from 0 to 100. The recorded data reliability was 99.6%. A first relevant step has been made on the design trajectory for a robot to obtain PROMs from older adults. Practice variation in subjective usability scores still asks for technical dialogue improvements.

Highlights

Patient report outcome measurements (PROMs) are questionnaires to record a patient’s opinion on the status of their health condition, health behavior, or their evaluation of received healthcare
A relevant aim is to decrease the time spent by nurses on administration. This allows more time left for providing the fundamentals of care, such as sharing fear and sorrow, securing appropriate nutrition, International Journal of Social Robotics (2020) 12:259–266 hydration, personal hygiene, sleep, rest, and interpersonal communication [9]
This paper describes the design of a multimodal dialogue for a social robot to acquire PROMs for older patients

Summary

Introduction

Patient report outcome measurements (PROMs) are questionnaires to record a patient’s opinion on the status of their health condition, health behavior, or their evaluation of received healthcare. A relevant aim is to decrease the time spent by nurses on administration. This allows more time left for providing the fundamentals of care, such as sharing fear and sorrow, securing appropriate nutrition, International Journal of Social Robotics (2020) 12:259–266 hydration, personal hygiene, sleep, rest, and interpersonal communication [9]

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Conclusion