The topic of AI-supported assistance in the healthcare sector has a multitude of aspects that refer to various disciplinary fields: Starting with AI-assisted dialog systems, robotics and smart-home applications up to sociological issues of the development and implementation of such systems in the clinical application domain, the topic can be observed through a wide variety of perspectives. On March 23, 2023, we have therefore invited to an interdisciplinary workshop entitled “Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives on Assistance by Artificial Agents in the Collection of PROMs” at the TU Berlin. We are very happy that we could win researchers from different disciplines for impulse talks on this topic!
We started with PD Felix Fischer from Charité Berlin, who is doing research on the topic of PROMs, as well as health measurement, and who talked about the challenges and opportunities of capturing patent-centered health. This was followed by the presentation of a scoping review by Jun.Prof. Sebastian Merkel on the use of voice assistance systems. After a short break, Kathrin Janowski summarized findings from research on artificial agents, focusing on what is key in designing social interaction with agents. The last scientific contribution of the workshop by PD Athanasios Karafillidis took a decidedly sociological perspective on the topic of technical assistance and explored the question of what distinguishes (technical) assistance and when it succeeds. A short story (design fiction) presented by Dr. Britta Schulte led into the discussion, taking a humorous perspective on the topic of assistance by robots. The discussion was visualized in the form of a graphic recording by Miss Vizzz and can be viewed below!