Children’s Fear and Pain During Medical Procedures: A Quality Improvement Study With a Humanoid Robot
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Pediatric patients undergo a variety of painful medical procedures. Purpose The goal of this quality improvement study was to introduce a humanoid robot (MEDi®) programmed with strategies, such as distraction and deep breathing, at inpatient and outpatient units to determine any preliminary effects on children’s pain and fear during medical procedures. Methods A nonrandomized two-group pre- and posttest design was used to compare pain and fear of children before and after intervention versus standard care. A total of 46 children aged 2–15 years undergoing various medical procedures in a pediatric hospital, and their parents completed the Children’s Fear Scale and the Faces Pain Scale-Revised. The former was used both before and after the procedure, while the latter only after the procedure. Results Children ( n = 18), who interacted with the robot before and during a procedure, and their parents reported significantly lower levels of fear and pain than did children ( n = 28) and their parents in standard care, ps < .05. Conclusions The use of a humanoid robot programmed with psychological strategies to support coping may enhance children’s experiences of care for pain management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".