Socially assistive robots as mental health interventions for children : a scoping review

Socially Assistive Robots are promising in their potential to promote and support mental health in children. There is a growing number of studies investigating the feasibility and effectiveness of robot interventions in supporting children’s mental wellbeing. Although preliminary evidence suggests that Socially Assistive Robots may have the potential to help address concerns such as stress and anxiety in children, there is a need for a greater focus in examining the impact of robotic interventions in this population. In order to better understand the current state of the evidence in this field and identify critical gaps, we carried out a scoping review of the available literature examining how social robots are investigated as means to support mental health in children. We identified existing types of robot intervention and measures that are being used to investigate specific mental health outcomes. Overall, our findings suggest that robot interventions for children may positively impact mental health outcomes such as relief of distress and increase positive affect. Results also show that the strength of evidence needs to be improved to determine what types of robotic interventions could be most effective and readily implemented in pediatric mental health care. Based on our findings, we propose a set of recommendations to guide further research in this area

Robotics Horizon

The Rt Hon David Willets, minister for Universities and Science identified the importance of Robotics and Autonomous Systems as a general technology: 'Robots acting independently of human control - which can learn, adapt and take decisions - will revolutionise our economy and society over the next 20 years' (Willetts 2013). The current report has the focus on the societal aspect of this revolution and briefly sets out the landscape of current and future robotic systems applied in everyday human life and offers a brief overview of what robotics currently is and might be about in the future. The report includes contributions from across the UK robotics community (though completeness is not claimed).The emphasis is on the application of robots operating in the vicinity of human beings that can learn, adapt and take decisions. However, the underlying enabling technologies such as machine vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence are not discussed separately

Social Assistive Robot for Cardiac Rehabilitation: A Pilot Study with Patients with Angioplasty

© 2018 Authors. Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) have been gaining significant attention in multiple health care applications. However, SAR has not been fully explored in cardiac rehabilitation (CR). One of the most critical issues in CR is the lack of adherence of patients to the rehabilitation process. Hence, based on the evidence that the presence of an embodied agent increases compliance, we present in this paper the integration of a social robot in a CR programme. The setup is evaluated with four patients divided into two conditions (robot and no robot), in order to evaluate its first four sessions as a preliminary study. The results show that this system might have a promising impact on CR and holds promise to be extended to a larger group of patients