Guest Speaker: Petr Slovak

How to design technology to support the learning of empathy skills?

Empathy and empathetic communication skills are gaining in importance in many domains including education, or medical and business communities. A particular interest is then on supporting the training and development of such skills, and exploring ways in which we can design technology to facilitate the training process and tackle existing challenges.

I will discuss an on-going project in which we aim to design and develop a system supporting an empathy skills curriculum for counselling students. In cooperation with a MSc. counselling program, we study how empathy skills are taught in this setting, and if/how feedback based on various aspects could facilitate this.

As part of this work, we examine a promising bio-indicator of empathic interactions, based on synchronisation of bio-signals between people; and its potential to serve as a useful feedback tool for the learning process in this context. Such focus on synchronisation is quite interesting and unique, as it combines and meshes users' physiological data -- making it inherently based on the interplay of signals of multiple individuals and bound to the interaction at hand (rather than on the individuals’ data in isolation, as is the case for most other bio-feedback work). This opens many intriguing questions around the ways in which such information can be presented to, and interpreted by, the users.

This research is pursued in cooperation between Technical University of Vienna, MRL, and recently also Newcastle University.