Automated Video Analysis of Non-verbal Communication in a Medical Setting.
Non-verbal communication plays a significant role in establishing good rapport between physicians and patients and may influence aspects of patient health outcomes. It is therefore important to analyze non-verbal communication in medical settings. Current approaches to measure non-verbal interactions in medicine employ coding by human raters. Such tools are labor intensive and hence limit the scale of possible studies. Here, we present an automated video analysis tool for non-verbal interactions in a medical setting. We test the tool using videos of subjects that interact with an actor portraying a doctor. The actor interviews the subjects performing one of two scripted scenarios of interviewing the subjects: in one scenario the actor showed minimal engagement with the subject. The second scenario included active listening by the doctor and attentiveness to the subject. We analyze the cross correlation in total kinetic energy of the two people in the dyad, and also characterize the frequency spectrum of their motion. We find large differences in interpersonal motion synchrony and entrainment between the two performance scenarios. The active listening scenario shows more synchrony and more symmetric followership than the other scenario. Moreover, the active listening scenario shows more high-frequency motion termed jitter that has been recently suggested to be a marker of followership. The present approach may be useful for analyzing physician-patient interactions in terms of synchrony and dominance in a range of medical settings.
The Theater Lab, Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot, Israel.
Yuval
Y
Hart
The Department of Neuroscience, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv UniversityTel Aviv, Israel; The Psychiatry Department, Chaim Sheba Medical CenterRamat-Gan, Israel.
Efrat
E
Czerniak
Department of Medical Education, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv, Israel.
Orit
O
Karnieli-Miller
The Theater Lab, Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot, Israel.
Avraham E
AE
Mayo
Department of Medical Education, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv UniversityTel Aviv, Israel; Israel Center for Medical Simulation, Chaim Sheba Medical CenterRamat-Gan, Israel.
Amitai
A
Ziv
Department of Neurology, Stony Brook University, New York New York, NY, USA.
Anat
A
Biegon
Department of Theater, Haifa University Haifa, Israel.
Atay
A
Citron
The Theater Lab, Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot, Israel.
Uri
U
Alon
doctor-patient interactions; entrainment; non-verbal communication; performance; synchronization; video analysis