Will robots dehumanize health care?
Many people report a frightening feeling about their stays in hospitals. Even if everyone treating them was kind, attentive, hardworking, efficient and competent, they still have had a sense that compared to other situations in which people were intensely looking after someone, something was different about being in the hospital. With all the measuring, palpating, listening for abnormal body sounds, injecting, and imaging of your innards, people felt treated like a kind of object, rather than a complete person. People have felt in a word, dehumanized. What does dehumanization actually mean? Dehumanization is the process of threating someone like he is not a human being. Technology can feel dehumanizing. Dehumanization does have some influences on our lifes and does have some benefits. For example, people live in a more connected world and compared to even a few decades ago, technology has extremely improved acces to information and content and have expanded the ablility to connect with one another in new ways to socialize despite time and distance. But still, …show more content…
Earlier studies found that dehumanizing patients can reduce health care workers their bad feelings and let them cope/deal better with the constant pain and illness they see. People need to humanize technology so that it treats the people the way they want to be treated. People think, feel, and act not just because of information, but also because of personally meaningful experience. Things have to matter to people, not just inform them, to effect real change. Personal technology needs to go beyond giving people access to information anywhere people are. It needs to go beyond opening a communication channel between people. It needs to go beyond being easy to use. It needs to go beyond being cool and desirable. All of these attributes are still critical pieces. But they do not yet form the full