Abstract
Clinical empathy can have numerous benefits for patients, clinicians, and health-care providers. Traditional empathy training techniques (e.g. storytelling, videos, or disease simulators) are centered on the health condition rather than the individual. This condition-centric approach perpetuates the belief that the disease, rather than the patient, is at the core of the experience. This process can be ineffective in generating the ability to understand and accurately acknowledge the feelings of another. A more effective means of eliciting empathy can be through technology-mediated symptom transference for transmitting an individual patient’s actual experience, rather than a simulation, to the user—a process termed “tele-empathy.” We developed an investigational digital tele-empathy device for use toward patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), known as SymPulse™. The device plays back muscle tremors using an armband, giving the wearer a replication of the involuntary muscle activity that a patient with PD feels. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether the SymPulse™ device could enhance feelings of empathy in test participants (wearing the device) versus control participants (not wearing the device). A sample of 45 participants (22 test; 23 control) reported their level of empathy via self-report questionnaires. Results revealed significantly higher empathy scale scores for test compared to control participants, demonstrating the effectiveness of the SymPulse™ for use in tele-empathy. The use of such technology for eliciting tele-empathy may have practical and clinical implications for providing effective training to health-care providers.
Highlights
Within the health-care literature, empathy has been defined as the ability to understand and accurately acknowledge the feelings of another, eliciting a more receptive response from the observer (Mercer & Reynolds, 2002; Post et al, 2014; Sinclair et al, 2017)
Despite all of the demonstrated benefits of experiencing empathy in health care, research indicates that formal empathy teaching in medical education is lacking and that the empathy of medical students is often stunted during medical education (Neumann et al, 2011; Pedersen, 2010; Sulzer, Feinstein, & Wendland, 2016)
EMG and the SymPulseTM can be used to transmit tele-empathy data in real-time (Figure 2), the primary purpose of the current study was to play back prerecorded muscle tremors to participants, rather than record the original data from Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients
Summary
Within the health-care literature, empathy has been defined as the ability to understand and accurately acknowledge the feelings of another, eliciting a more receptive response from the observer (Mercer & Reynolds, 2002; Post et al, 2014; Sinclair et al, 2017). Clinical empathy involves both cognitive and affective components, which include (1) understanding the patient’s situation, thoughts, and feelings, (2) verifying its precision with the patient, and (3) responding to the patient in a helpful manner (Jeffrey, 2016; Mercer & Reynolds, 2002; Sinclair et al, 2017). Most empathy training for medical students involves self-assessment and storytelling, which may not be effective in eliciting accurate empathy for patients
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