Facial masking is a symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD) in which humans lose the ability to quickly create refined facial expressions. This difficulty of people with PD can be mistaken for apathy or dishonesty by their caregivers and lead to a breakdown in social relationships. We envision future "robot mediators" that could ease tensions in these caregiver-client relationships by intervening when interactions go awry. However, it is currently unknown whether people with PD would even accept a robot as part of their healthcare processes. We thus conducted a first human-robot interaction study to assess the extent to which people with PD are willing to discuss their health status with a robot. We specifically compared a robot interviewer to a human interviewer in a within-subjects design that allowed us to control for individual differences of the subjects with PD caused by their individual disease progression. We found that participants overall reacted positively to the robot, even though they preferred interactions with the human interviewer. Importantly, the robot performed at a human level at maintaining the participants' dignity, which is critical for future social mediator robots for people with PD.
@incollection{briggsetal15hri,
title={Are Robots Ready for Administering Health Status Surveys: First Results from an HRI Study with Subjects with Parkinsons Disease},
author={Priscilla Briggs and Matthias Scheutz and Linda Tickle-Degnen},
year={2015},
booktitle={Proceedings of 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/briggsetal15hri.pdf}
}