Eliciting clinical empathy via transmission of patient-specific symptoms of Parkinson’s disease

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.

Keywords:

• empathy
• tele-empathy
• investigational device
• health care
• Parkinson’s disease

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

It has been shown that enhanced empathy in caregivers can be an important factor leading to better patient outcomes. However, traditional empathy training methods, such as storytelling and videos, can be ineffective in generating the ability to accurately understand the feelings of individual patients. The goal of the present research is based on the premise that empathy can be cultivated and improved by the use of digital technology. This study explores the effects of personalized transmissions of patient-specific symptoms of Parkinson’s disease by analyzing the muscle activity of a patient’s tremor and playing back the signal in caregivers through muscle stimulation. This type of health-care technology has the potential to transmit symptom data from individual patients in real-time so that caregivers can physically feel those symptoms. The enhanced empathy generated from the device could foster better perception and judgment of patient symptoms and possibly improve diagnosis and treatment outcomes.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here 10.1080/23311908.2018.1526459

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all of the project members, supporters, and researchers at Klick Inc. for the successful development, implementation, and evaluation of this research.

Competing interests

Adam Palanica, Anirudh Thommandram, and Yan Fossat are full-time employees of Klick Inc., the sponsor company of the research, which currently owns the technology and has a patent pending for the SymPulse™ device. This research was internally funded and received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Author Contributions

A.P. executed the study, collected the data, analyzed the results, and contributed to writing the manuscript. A.T. engineered and built the SymPulse™ device and contributed to the writing of the manuscript. Y.F. developed the concept of “tele-empathy,” assisted in data collection, and contributed to the writing and editing of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the literature search and have approved the final manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Adam Palanica

Adam Palanica holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience Psychology from the University of Waterloo and has utilized his expertise to advance academic research and commercial applications. Presently, he works as a behavioral scientist in the health-care field and helps to bring new insights and methodologies for research with pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, rehabilitation institutes, health-care professionals, caregivers, and patients. He works for Klick Labs, which is a digital medicine and research facility based in Toronto, Canada. The Klick Labs team focuses on creating solutions that engage and educate health-care providers about life-saving treatments and help inform and empower patients to manage their health and play a central role in their own care.