Artificial Empathy

Open to UK applicants only

Supervisors:

Professor Jeremy Howick  jh815@leicester.ac.uk 

Professor Simon Gay spg22@leicester.ac.uk

Dr Amber Bennett-Weston abw13@leicester.ac.uk

Project Description

Background: Empathic healthcare improves patient safety,¹ quality of life, and satisfaction with their care while reducing pain^2,3 and mortality.⁴ Empathy can also reduce practitioner burnout.^5,6 In parallel, artificially intelligent (AI) care- and chat-bots are increasingly playing patient-facing roles in healthcare. There are concerns regarding how empathic these AI care- and chat-bots can provide empathic (and therefore, effective and safe) care. To address this, the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare are seeking to ensure that AI care- and chat-bots provide empathic healthcare, while simultaneously ensuring that healthcare practitioners retain their human advantages.

Please note: While hosted in a medical school, this is not a medical education project per se. The PhD candidates will focus on the research to underpin an evidence-based curriculum.

Aim: To develop, deliver, and evaluate AI (or AI-informed) empathy interventions for healthcare students and practitioners.

Research questions & how answering them will contribute to wider knowledge.

Can artificially intelligent care- and chat-bots be as empathic as human practitioners (and can they leverage the benefits of empathic care for patients)? Like it or not, care- and chat-bots are increasingly being used for patient care, even at times replacing human beings. These new technologies have not been evaluated so the extent to which they can be empathic (and thus generate the positive patient benefits of empathic care) is not known.

Can virtual reality be used to train healthcare practitioners and medical students to enhance how they express empathy? Virtual reality (VR) training devices are being used and developed at a very fast pace. We do not know the relative benefits and risks of VR training for healthcare practitioners compared with training from real human trainers.

Methods: The methods will be tailored to the research question, and will include:

• systematic review to identify best existing practice;
• qualitative research to refine interventions; and
• rigorous evaluation (where feasible, with controlled trials) of curriculum interventions.

The Stoneygate Team has international expertise and can supervise students who use any of the above methods.

Anticipated outputs and impact: The Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare has connections with medical schools and professional bodies within the UK and abroad, so this doctoral research will have a measurable and important positive impact on both patients and practitioners. Under the directorship of Professor Jeremy Howick, Dr Amber Bennett-Weston, and Professor Simon Gay the doctoral student will produce multiple publications per year.

References:

1. Keshtkar L, Bennett-Weston A, Khan AS, et al. Impacts of Communication Type and Quality on Patient Safety Incidents: A Systematic Review. Annals of Internal Medicine. 2025;
2. Howick J, Moscrop A, Mebius A, et al. Effects of empathic and positive communication in healthcare consultations: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2018;111(7):240-252. doi:10.1177/0141076818769477
3. Keshtkar L, Madigan CD, Ward A, et al. The Effect of Practitioner Empathy on Patient Satisfaction : A Systematic Review of Randomized Trials. Ann Intern Med. Jan 30 2024;doi:10.7326/M23-2168
4. Dambha-Miller H, Feldman AL, Kinmonth AL, Griffin SJ. Association Between Primary Care Practitioner Empathy and Risk of Cardiovascular Events and All-Cause Mortality Among Patients With Type 2 Diabetes: A Population-Based Prospective Cohort Study. Ann Fam Med. Jul 2019;17(4):311-318. doi:10.1370/afm.2421
5. Thirioux B, Birault F, Jaafari N. Empathy Is a Protective Factor of Burnout in Physicians: New Neuro-Phenomenological Hypotheses Regarding Empathy and Sympathy in Care Relationship. Front Psychol. 2016;7:763. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00763
6. Gleichgerrcht E, Decety J. Empathy in clinical practice: how individual dispositions, gender, and experience moderate empathic concern, burnout, and emotional distress in physicians. PloS one. 2013;8(4):e61526. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0061526