Rosemarijn Looije

Incorporating guidelines for health assistance into a socially intelligent robot

The world population is getting older and more and more people suffer from a chronic disease such as diabetes. The need for medical (self-)care therefore increases, and we think a personal (robot) assistant could help. This paper gives guidelines for self-care that supports and shows how it could be incorporated in a (embodied) personal assistant. These guidelines were derived from motivational interviewing, persuasive technology, and from existing guidelines for personal assistants. Questions this paper addresses include: Is it possible to incorporate them in a personal assistant? Can a robot have the same kind of dialogs as a text interface? A first experiment, conducted with young participants, showed that the guidelines were best expressed in a socially intelligent iCat in comparison with a nonsocially intelligent iCat, a social and nonsocially intelligent Tiggie, and a text interface. Furthermore it showed that people indeed preferred the iCat over the text interface, possibly because the iCats social intelligence

Adaptive emotional expression in robot-child interaction

Expressive behaviour is a vital aspect of human interaction. A model for adaptive emotion expression was developed for the Nao robot. The robot has an internal arousal and valence value, which are influenced by the emotional state of its interaction partner and emotional occurrences such as winning a game. It expresses these emotions through its voice, posture, whole body poses, eye colour and gestures. An experiment with 18 children (mean age 9) and two Nao robots was conducted to study the influence of adaptive emotion expression on the interaction behaviour and opinions of children. In a within-subjects design the children played a quiz with both an affective robot using the model for adaptive emotion expression and a non-affective robot without this model. The affective robot reacted to the emotions of the child using the implementation of the model, the emotions of the child were interpreted by a Wizard of Oz. The dependent variables, namely the behaviour and opinions of the children, were measured through video analysis and questionnaires. The results show that children react more expressively and more positively to a robot which adaptively expresses itself than to a robot which does not. The feedback of the children in the questionnaires further suggests that showing emotion through movement is considered a very positive trait for a robot. From their positive reactions we can conclude that children enjoy interacting with a robot which adaptively expresses itself through emotion and gesture more than with a robot which does not do this. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1 [Information Systems Models and Principles]: User / Machine Systems

Child-Robot Interaction: Perspectives and Challenges

Child-Robot Interaction (cHRI) is a promising point of entry into the rich challenge that social HRI is. Starting from three years of experiences gained in a cHRI research project, this paper offers a view on the opportunities offered by letting robots interact with children rather than with adults and having the interaction in real-world circumstances rather than lab settings. It identifies the main challenges which face the field of cHRI: the technical challenges, while tremendous, might be overcome by moving away from the classical perspective of seeing social cognition as residing inside an agent, to seeing social cognition as a continuous and self-correcting interaction between two agents.

Using a robot to personalise health education for children with diabetes type 1: A pilot study

OBJECTIVE Assess the effects of personalised robot behaviours on the enjoyment and motivation of children (8-12) with diabetes, and on their acquisition of health knowledge, in educational play. METHODS Children (N=5) played diabetes quizzes against a personal or neutral robot on three occasions: once at the clinic, twice at home. The personal robot asked them about their names, sports and favourite colours, referred to these data during the interaction, and engaged in small talk. Fun, motivation and diabetes knowledge was measured. Child-robot interaction was observed. RESULTS Children said the robot and quiz were fun, but this appreciation declined over time. With the personal robot, the children looked more at the robot and spoke more. The children mimicked the robot. Finally, an increase in knowledge about diabetes was observed. CONCLUSION The study provides strong indication for how a personal robot can help children to improve health literacy in an enjoyable way. Children mimic the robot. When the robot is personal, they follow suit. Our results are positive and establish a good foundation for further development and testing in a larger study. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS Using a robot in health care could contribute to self-management in children and help them to cope with their illness.

Usability engineering for mobile maps

Many applications for mobile devices make use of maps, but because interaction with these maps can be laborious the applications are often hard to use. Therefore, the usability of maps on mobile devices must be improved. In this paper we review the research that has been done to solve technical, environmental, and social challenges of mobile map use. We will discuss interaction, visualization, and adaptive user support for maps on mobile devices. We propose usability engineering as the method that should be used when developing maps for mobile applications.

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI.

Child's recognition of emotions in robot's face and body

Social robots can comfort and support children who have to cope with chronic diseases. In previous studies, a “facial robot”, the iCat, proved to show well-recognized emotional expressions that are important in social interactions. The question is if a mobile robot without a face, the Nao, can express emotions with its body. First, dynamic body postures were created and validated that express fear, happiness, anger, sadness and surprise. Then, fourteen children had to recognize emotions, expressed by both robots. Recognition rates were relatively high (between 68% and 99% accuracy). Only for the emotion “sad”, the recognition was better for the iCat (95%) compared to the Nao (68%). Providing context increased the number of correct recognitions. In a second session, the emotions were significantly better recognized than during the first session for both robots. In sum, we succeeded to design Nao emotions, which were well recognized and learned, and can be important ingredients of the social dialogs with children.

Help, I need some body the effect of embodiment on playful learning

Children with a chronic disease like diabetes need to learn how to self manage their disease. Knowledge about their condition is indispensable to reach this goal. Within the European project ALIZ-E a robot companion is being developed that should, among others attributes, have the capability to educate children. In this paper, a virtual agent on a screen is compared with a physical robot on the aspects of performance (learning), attention and motivation. The experiment consisted of two sessions in which children played a quiz consisting of health related questions with both the robot and the virtual agent, there was a week between the two sessions. It was found that performance and motivation were not affected by the embodiment, but the robot did attract more attention and, when forced to choose, the children had a preference for the robot.

A remote social robot to motivate and support diabetic children in keeping a diary

Children with diabetes can benefit from keeping a diary, but seldom keep one. Within the European ALIZ-E project a robot companion is being developed that, among other things, will be able to support and motivate diabetic children to keep a diary. This paper discusses the study of a robot supporting the use of an online diary. Diabetic children kept an online diary for two weeks, both with and without remote support from the robot via webcam. The effect of the robot was studied on children’s use of the diary and their relationship with the robot. Results show that children shared significantly more personal experiences in their diaries when they were interacting with the robot. Furthermore, they greatly enjoyed working with the robot and came to see it as a helpful and supportive friend.Categories and Subject DescriptorsH.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human factors; I.2.9 [Robotics]: Operator Interfaces; J.4 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences.General TermsDesign, Experimentation, Human Factors, Verification.

I just have diabetes: children's need for diabetes self-management support and how a social robot can accommodate their needs

Children with type 1 diabetes need to self-manage their illness to minimize its impact on their long-term health. However, because children are still developing cognitively and emotionally, self-management is challenging. The European FP7 project, ALIZ-E, looks at how social robots can support children aged 8–12 years with their diabetes self-management. To acquire user requirements for such a robot, we studied how diabetes self-management is organized for children and how they experience their illness and its management regarding their quality of life. Methods: We conducted semistructured interviews with diabetes caregivers (n = 6) and children 8–12 with type 1 diabetes (n = 9), and surveyed their parents (n = 9). Results: Results of the interviews with caregivers show that parents play a prominent role in diabetes self-management and, accordingly, children do not experience significant problems. However, because children develop a need for autonomy during puberty, it is important that they become more proficient in their self-management at an earlier age. Results of the interviews with children show that they accept diabetes as a part of their life and want to be seen as regular children. Also, children experience difficulties in unusual situations (eg, doing sports and vacationing) and at school. The illness comes at the cost of the child’s mental well-being (eg, insecurity, fear, and worry) and physical well-being (eg, listlessness and tiredness). Regarding social well-being, children enjoy attending diabetes camps and having friends with diabetes, due to a common understanding of their condition. Finally, parents are not always fully aware of how children experience their illness. Conclusion: Children could benefit from social robots offering motivation, training, and (parental) monitoring and support, and serving as a fallback for uncommon events. To prevent stigmatization, the robot would need to act as a buddy and not as a support tool in the management of diabetes.