Telemedicine: critical massing or déjà vu, dear Humans, too?

August 4, 2015 | by

A veritable blitz of telemedicine advocacy articles have appeared in the past week in leading healthcare and business publications. All of them promote telemedicine as a mix of consumer friendly (rapid care from anywhere at relatively low cost), a solution to the paucity of primary and specialty care in rural America, and contributing to quality affordable care. They both point out the increasing acceptability of the online consult (75 percent of consumers favor in a recent Cisco survey) and by doctors (60 percent). The writers are former Senator, Majority Leader and practicing surgeon Dr Bill Frist, and Dr Boxer is the chief telehealth officer of Pager and chief medical officer of Well Via. Health Affairs (Frist) and Wall Street Journal (Boxer).

Of course, do you need a human doctor at the other end, or will Humans do? The University of Southern California has tested Ellie, a virtual human,who’s been successful at getting patients to report honestly to her–more honestly than to real people.  (more…)

Humanoid robots and virtual humans in the ‘uncanny valley’

October 8, 2014 | by
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/uncanny_2.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]One of the challenges that designers of both robots and ‘virtual humans’ in online simulation settings is to make them, in the dictum of pioneering industrial designer Raymond Loewy, MAYA–‘most advanced yet acceptable’. The MAYA of robotics appearance was stated about 40 years ago by Professor Masahiro Mori at the Tokyo Institute of Technology; the more human and less machine-like the appearance, the more positive a real human’s emotional response will be. But as simulated humans have progressed in commercial animation and in online settings to ‘almost human’, there is a ‘creepiness factor’ that emerges (more…)