BACKGROUND New supervisory regulations highlight the challenge of balancing housestaff supervision and autonomy. To better understand the impact of increased supervision on residency training, we investigated housestaff perceptions of education, autonomy, and clinical decision-making before and after implementation of an in-hospital, overnight attending physician (nocturnist). METHODS We esta...

In healthcare, robots are increasingly being used to provide a high standard of care in the near future. When machines interact with humans, we need to ensure that these machines take into account patient autonomy. Autonomy can be defined as negative autonomy and positive autonomy. We present a moral reasoning system that takes into account this twofold approach of autonomy. In simulation exper...

BACKGROUND The Internet is bringing fundamental changes to medical practice through improved access to health information and participation in decision making. However, patient preferences for participation in health care vary greatly. Promoting patient-centered health care requires an understanding of the relationship between Internet use and a broader range of preferences for participation th...

The successful integration and acceptance of many multi-agent systems into daily lives crucially depends on the ability to develop effective policies for adjustable autonomy. Adjustable autonomy encompasses the strategies by which an agent selects the appropriate entity (itself, a human user, or another agent) to make a decision at key moments when an action is required. We present two formulat...

Social attributes of intelligent robots are important for human-robot systems.This paper investigates influences of robot autonomy (i.e., high versus low) and group orientation (i.e., ingroup versus outgroup) on a human decision-making process. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 48 college students and tested the hypotheses with MANCOVA. We find that a robot with high autonomy has greate...

PURPOSE Research underscores how autonomy and decision-making involvement may help to enhance the quality of life of older adults; however, individuals with dementia are often excluded from decision making that is related to their daily functioning. In this study we use a modified version of the Stress Process Model to consider the stress process of individuals with chronic illness, and in part...

Multi-agent systems require adaptability to perform effectively in complex and dynamic environments. This article shows that agents should be able to benefit from dynamically adapting their decision-making frameworks. A decision-making framework describes the set of multi-agent decision-making interactions exercised by members of an agent group in the course of pursuing a goal or set of goals. ...

A postal questionnaire survey of 10 022 staff nurses in 32 hospitals in England was undertaken to explore the relationship between interdisciplinary teamwork and nurse autonomy on patient and nurse outcomes and nurse assessed quality of care. The key variables of nursing autonomy, control over resources, relationship with doctors, emotional exhaustion, and decision making were found to correlat...

Because of a dearth of literature, we developed preventive ethics strategies for managing the pregnancies of patients with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can chronically and variably impair a woman's decisions concerning the management of pregnancy, including the decision about whether to continue the pregnancy through to viability and term. The psychiatrist must balance autonomy-based and benefi...

The dominant, individualistic understanding of autonomy that features in clinical practice and research is underpinned by the idea that people are, in their ideal form, independent, self-interested and rational gain-maximising decision-makers. In recent decades, this paradigm has been challenged from various disciplinary and intellectual directions. Proponents of 'relational autonomy' in partic...