Social Robot for Health Check and Entertainment in Waiting Room: Child’s Engagement and Parent’s Involvement

Abstract

To provide effective support in child health care, social robots’ behaviors should be well-tailored to the care context and situated user needs. This research focuses on a social robot (iPal) in the waiting room for a vaccination. In an experiment, children performed the health check and hereafter, to kill the time, a game, either with the robot or a tablet. Child’s behaviors and self-reports were recorded. The children seemed to be more positively engaged when interacting with the robot (higher motivation to play a game, higher interaction volume, more smiling during the health check, more gesture and/or verbal expressive behaviors, less mobile phone distraction). Further, their individual characteristics (like age and personality) and the social context (e.g., parent’s presence) affected children’s engagement (e.g., higher for young children) and parent’s involvement (e.g., higher with the tablet group, resulting in a higher percentage of answered questions during the health check). Here, we identified an interesting trade-off: the current robot supports child engagement (distracting from the stressful vaccination), but hinders the collaboration between parent and child. In future research, we aim to improve the collaboration support of the robot.