tltsymposium18

Dyadic human relationships with power differentials exist in a range of situations: parent-child, teacher-student, caregiver-patient, etc. We are currently studying how robots can help with problems that arise in human-human relationships of this sort, in particular looking at patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Early stage Parkinson’s disease is characterized by facial masking that reduces the ability for a caregiver to effectively comprehend the emotional state of a patient. To remedy these challenges, we hypothesize that a robot mediator can be used to assist in the relationship between PD patients and their caregivers, reducing the stigmatization that often occurs due to this loss of nonverbal communication. To overcome this stigmatization, providing therapeutic robots with an ethical architecture can potentially help to ensure that patients’ and caregivers’ dignity is maintained. 

Towards this goal of maintaining effective patient-caregiver relationships and preventing the loss of dignity, we have developed two approaches to address this problem that leverage our prior research in ethical architectures. First, we are studying the introduction of a robotic co-mediator to increase the communicative bandwidth in this relationship for fostering empathic response in the caregiver. This requires modeling moral emotions in the patient, such as shame and embarrassment, while looking for lack of congruence in the caregiver regarding the perception of the emotional state of the patient. A PD patient is liable to suffer indignity when there is a substantial difference between his experienced shame and the empathy shown by the caregiver. When this difference strays from acceptable norms, the robotic agent will act using subtle, nonverbal kinesic (body language) cues to drive the relationship towards acceptable social and medical treatment norms with the intent of preserving patient dignity. 

Second, we have developed an extension of our robotic ethical governor that enables intervention should acceptable behavioral bounds be exceeded by either the patient or the caregiver. Here, the approach to uphold PD patient dignity is through the use of an ethical robot that mediates patient shame when it recognizes norm violations in the patient-caregiver interaction by overt robotic action using kinesic and verbal intervention as required. It is straightforward to envision how this research could be applied in other domains, such as education. This research is funded by the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative under Grant #IIS 1317214.