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P. Slovak, P. Tennent, G. Fitzpatrick:
"Supporting empathetic interactions between doctors and patients";
Talk: CHI 2013 workshop on Patient-Clinician Communication The Roadmap for Human-Computer Interaction, Paris, France (invited); 2013-04-28.

Empathy and empathetic communication skills are gaining in importance in medical community [9, 1, 4, 3], with various communication skills courses existing for students as well as practicing doctors. To quote Brown [2], the topic has recently raised from its status as a ´nice to know´ subject to that of a ´need to know´ skill set in modern medical education.
Still, empathy skills of medical students have been shown to decrease over the course of studies [7] and there is a need for interventions to counter this [8]. Similarly, there is interest in improved training courses for specialised groups of medical personnel such as those in cancer care or end-of-life care, where specific skills related to empathy and communication are even more important [11, 1, 12].
As such, this topic could pose many interesting challenges and opportunities for HCI research in the medical domain, especially as only very few of existing courses and interventions utilise any technology at all.

empathy, physiological signals

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_225044.pdf