New technology might help us become more empathetic to others ’ suffering

Tele-empathy is not being empathetic over the phone. It is not crying in the sad parts of your favorite TV show. It is not beaming empathetic thoughts magically across time and space. No, tele-empathy is a technology. I should rather say, it’s a group of technologies recently being created to increase the empathy of health care providers. “This is rich,” you might say coming from an industry that brought us electronic medical records, automated “help desks,” and robocallers. Sandeep Juhar, a writer for the New York Times, tried out one of these devices, one that simulates the uncontrollable shaking suffered by Parkinson’s patients, and describes tele-empathy as follows: “tele-empathy”: using technology to improve insight into the patient experience. Movement disorders like Parkinson’s are one aspect of this work, but there are others. Engineers are studying the airflow patterns of patients with emphysema to replicate their shortness of breath in others. A virtual-reality program is being developed to misalign sound from video, a technique called dephasing, in ways that mimic the experience of disordered thinking in psychiatric illness. Gadgets are being made to numb the feet to reproduce the symptoms of diabetic nerve disease. Makers of medical devices are usually not motivated by empathy themselves, so they must think there’s a market for this sort of thing. Why? Because empathy is in short supply virtually everywhere you look. The GOP health ...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Tech Hospital-Based Medicine Primary Care Source Type: blogs