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