Supporting Health Care Professionals With a Social Robot in an Integrated Care Pathway: A Randomized Controlled Trial

There is a worldwide increasing shortage of adequately trained healthcare personnel, leading to the challenge for society to prevent a future "lack of care". At the same time the number of people requiring healthcare is expanding rapidly, amongst others due to the growing percentage of older adults in the population. New means of supporting the available healthcare professionals are therefore urgently required.

Modern healthcare is often implemented through "integrated care pathways". Certain steps in these pathways involve dialogues with patients. Speaking social robots are increasingly being advertised as supportive for healthcare professionals and may handle certain structured dialogue types, such as questionnaires. Based on previous positive preclinical experiences with social robots interviewing community-dwelling older subjects, the researchers want to investigate the implementation of a social robot in an integrated care pathway in the outpatient clinic.