When you think of “compassionate technology” it may seem like a strange combination of words. But in mental health care, values such as compassion are considered very important. Compassion means being open to another, empathizing and wanting to help alleviate problems. How could technology actually support that value?
To get a sense of the ways technology has previously been associated with compassion or empathy, we've scoured the scientific literature. We specifically looked at articles about technology that was linked to mental health or mental health care and that mentioned compassion or empathy. We found 33 different articles about chatbots, robots, virtual reality, video calling, and more. We saw three different ways in which technology could support compassion. First of all, technology itself can show a bit of compassion. For example, you can think of a chatbot that responds in a compassionate way to what you type. Furthermore, technology can help to train self-compassion. There are many apps, internet and virtual reality interventions that are being developed for this. For example, in virtual reality you can practice being understanding towards a virtual child, and then take the child's place yourself and hear back your own supportive sentences. Finally, technology can support compassion between people. Of course you can think of video calling, but we also found a game, online support groups, and a social robot. That robot was used, for example, to promote compassionate contact between children with a disease and their parents. For all these forms of technology, we also looked at which different elements of compassion they support. Compassion is seen as a broad concept with 5 different elements. These elements are noticing suffering, seeing suffering as something human, empathizing, remaining open, and wanting to support in alleviating it. View the article here to see how technology could contribute to these elements.
