This work aims to explore the efficacy of health counseling by humanoid robots in cancer genetics.
Individuals with a personal or familial cancer history that indicates potential inherited risks are usually recommended genetic counseling and testing. Despite being standard of care, it is estimated that less than 50% of at-risk individuals obtain genetic counseling. In addition, information regarding genetic risks is often difficult to understand, especially for individuals with low health literacy. Automation of genetic counseling is particularly important given the current shortage of genetic counselors in the US.
We are developing and evaluating a robotic genetic counselor using the Pepper robot. Pepper has ideal affordances for health counseling, given its speech generation and recognition ability, articulate humanoid arms and hands for conversational hand gestures, and its integrated LCD screen that can be used to display data visualizations of risk, frequencies, and other numeric information.