Robot for health data acquisition among older adults: a pilot randomised controlled cross-over trial

BACKGROUND /OBJECTIVES: Healthcare professionals (HCP) are confronted with an increased demand for assessments of important health status measures, such as patient-reported outcome measurements (PROM), and the time this requires. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness and acceptability of using an HCP robot assistant, and to test the hypothesis that a robot can autonomously acquire PROM data from older adults. DESIGN: A pilot randomised controlled cross-over study where a social robot and a nurse administered three PROM questionnaires with a total of 52 questions. SETTING: A clinical outpatient setting with community-dwelling older adults. PARTICIPANTS: Forty-two community-dwelling older adults (mean age: 77.1 years, SD: 5.7 years, 45% female). MEASUREMENTS: The primary outcome was the task time required for robot–patient and nurse–patient interactions. Secondary outcomes were the similarity of the data and the percentage of robot interactions completed autonomously. The questionnaires resulted in two values (robot and nurse) for three indexes of frailty, well-being and resilience. The data similarity was determined by comparing these index values using Bland-Altman plots, Cohen’s kappa (κ) and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC). Acceptability was assessed using questionnaires. RESULTS: The mean robot interview duration was 16.57 min (SD=1.53 min), which was not significantly longer than the nurse interviews (14.92 min, SD=8.47 min; p=0.19). The three Bland-Altman plots showed moderate to substantial agreement between the frailty, well-being and resilience scores (κ=0.61, 0.50 and 0.45, and ICC=0.79, 0.86 and 0.66, respectively). The robot autonomously completed 39 of 42 interviews (92.8%). CONCLUSION: Social robots may effectively and acceptably assist HCPs by interviewing older adults.