Preserving dignity in patient caregiver relationships using moral emotions and robots

This paper provides an overview of an ongoing NSF project that is intended to improve the long-term quality of care for patients suffering from early stage Parkinson's disease. Due to facial masking in the patient, a stigmatization often occurs in their relationship with the caregiver due to the inability to adequately perceive the patient's emotional state. We are developing robot co-mediators to assist in the transmission of this information through the use of artificial moral emotions that trigger suitable proxemic expressions in the robot, with the goal of ensuring that the quality of the patient-caregiver relationship is preserved.