Proof of Concept of a Social Robot for Patient Reported Outcome Measurements in Elderly Persons.

Medical staff uses Patient Reported Outcome Measurement (PROM) questionnaires as a means of collecting information on the effectiveness of care delivered to patients as perceived by the patients themselves. Especially for the older patient group, the PROM questioning poses an undesirable workload on the staff. This proof of concept paper investigates whether a social robot with a display can conduct such questioning in an acceptable and reliable way. A set of 15 typical questions was selected from existing PROM questionnaires. For the asking, answer-processing and responding, a multi-modal robot-dialogue was designed and implemented. In a within-subjects experiment, 31 community-dwelling older participants answered the 15 questions in two conditions: questioning by the robot, versus questioning by a human. The main part of the robot questioning provided reliable answers, but took somewhat more time compared to human questioning. The experiment demonstrated the feasibility of a social robot for an acceptable and reliable collection of PROM data from older persons.