Cheng "Chris" Chen, assistant professor of communication design, worked with a team of researchers at Penn State University to better understand AI-driven "online symptom checkers."
Assistant Professor of Communication Design Cheng “Chris” Chen was recently highlighted by Medical Update Online for her research on patient satisfaction with online symptom checkers or “AI doctors.”
The research, with a team from Penn State University, was published in the journal “Communication Research.” Chen and her colleagues found thatthe more social information an AI doctor recalls about patients, the higher the patients satisfaction, but only if they were offered privacy control.
When an AI doctor recalls a patients social information, it is perceived as putting more effort into individuation, which leads to higher patient satisfaction, but only when the patient has privacy control, said Chen. This was surprising because AI systems treat all data the same, but patients see it differently. They perceived it as the doctor putting in more effort to recall the patients social information.
Read more on Chen’s research at .