Paper short abstract:

How do technology-mediated consultations engage health professionals and patients differently than interactions allowed by physical proximity? To understand the communicative effects of digital health technology on participants, we study empirically how empathy is enacted in digital consultations.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation contributes to the ongoing discussion of how use of digital technologies in healthcare can alter the conditions for demonstrating empathy and proximity in health professionals’ relationship with patients. Use of digital communication will likely increase over the next few years in the Danish healthcare system and abroad. Hence, it is important to understand how technology-mediated consultations between health professionals and patients is different from consultations based on physical proximity. That helps improving the understanding of strengths and weaknesses of digital health communication. The empirical basis for our presentation is derived from ongoing empirical research on digital video consultations between patient and general practitioner, and between COPD patients in their own homes and a specialist nurse in a hospital. We mainly draw on phenomenology and post-phenomenology as theoretical basis. Phenomenological thinkers such as Max Scheler, Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein have elaborated and founded the phenomenological tradition on the concept of empathy, which has been further developed over time in the cognitive sciences. On the other hand, the postphenomenological, STS-embedded tradition of Don Ihde has not, to our knowledge, developed the concept of empathy in any systematic way. In our presentation, we will try to establish a bridge between classical phenomenology and post-phenomenology, where the concept of technological mediation is brought into play as part of investigating, and possibly justifying, technologically mediated proximity and empathy. Merleau-Ponty's concept of whole-body presence will be used in our argumentation.