Making New "New AI" Friends : Designing a Social Robot for Diabetic Children from an Embodied AI Perspective

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Robin is a cognitively and motivationally autonomous affective robot toddler with "robot diabetes" that we have developed to support perceived self-efficacy and emotional wellbeing in children with diabetes by providing them with positive mastery experiences of diabetes management in a playful but realistic and natural interaction context. Underlying the design of Robin is an "Embodied" (formerly also known as "New") Artificial Intelligence approach to robotics. In this paper we discuss the rationale behind the design of Robin to meet the needs of our intended end users (both children and medical staff), and how "New AI" provides a suitable approach to developing a friendly companion that fulfills the therapeutic and affective requirements of our end users beyond other approaches commonly used in assistive robotics and child-robot interaction. Finally, we discuss how our approach permitted our robot to interact with and provide suitable experiences of diabetes management to children with very different social interaction styles.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

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

Designing an educational interactive eBook for newly diagnosed children with type 1 diabetes: Mapping a new design space

peer-reviewedIn this paper, we report on a project investigating the role of Interactive Technologies (IT) and participatory design methods in supporting self-care practices in paediatric Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM). In particular, we discuss the design of an educational interactive eBook to support newly diagnosed children and their families in learning about effective management outside the clinical–medical consultation. We use our design as an illustration of a potential new design space for type 1 diabetes learning resources. We map this space by identifying a series of oppositions that helps us to explore new design assumptions that could better support the education of newly diagnosed children and families: learning alone vs learning together, medical vs patient perspective, prescriptive language vs narratives and social stories, and static vs interactive educational contents. Through a discussion of these shifting of points of focus in the design of educational products in T1DM, we hope to open up new opportunities to rethink the design of tools to support the education of paediatric diabetes (and possibly of other chronic diseases and conditions)

Robots in education and care of children with developmental disabilities : a study on acceptance by experienced and future professionals

Research in the area of robotics has made available numerous possibilities for further innovation in the education of children, especially in the rehabilitation of those with learning difficulties and/or intellectual disabilities. Despite the scientific evidence, there is still a strong scepticism against the use of robots in the fields of education and care of people. Here we present a study on the acceptance of robots by experienced practitioners (specialized in the treatment of intellectual disabilities) and university students in psychology and education sciences (as future professionals). The aim is to examine the factors, through the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model, that may influence the decision to use a robot as an instrument in the practice. The overall results confirm the applicability of the model in the context of education and care of children, and suggest a positive attitude towards the use of the robot. The comparison highlights some scepticism among the practitioners, who perceive the robot as an expensive and limited tool, while students show a positive perception and a significantly higher willingness to use the robot. From this experience, we formulate the hypothesis that robots may be accepted if more integrated with standard rehabilitation protocols in a way that benefits can outweigh the costs

Child–robot relationship formation: A narrative review of empirical research

This narrative review aimed to elucidate which robot-related characteristics predict relationship formation between typically-developing children and social robots in terms of closeness and trust. Moreover, we wanted to know to what extent relationship formation can be explained by children’s experiential and cognitive states during interaction with a robot. We reviewed 86 journal articles and conference proceedings published between 2000 and 2017. In terms of predictors, robots’ responsiveness and role, as well as strategic and emotional interaction between robot and child, increased closeness between the child and the robot. Findings about whether robot features predict children’s trust in robots were inconsistent. In terms of children’s experiential and cognitive states during interaction with a robot, robot characteristics and interaction styles were associated with two experiential states: engagement and enjoyment/liking. The literature hardly addressed the impact of experiential and cognitive states on closeness and trust. Comparisons of children’s interactions with robots, adults, and objects showed that robots are perceived as neither animate nor inanimate, and that they are entities with whom children will likely form social relationships. Younger children experienced more enjoyment, were less sensitive to a robot’s interaction style, and were more prone to anthropomorphic tendencies and effects than older children. Tailoring a robot’s sex to that of a child mainly appealed to boys

A Psychological Need-Fulfillment Perspective for Designing Social Robots that Support Well-Being

This conceptual paper presents a novel framework for the design and study of social robots that support well-being. Building upon the self-determination theory and the associated Motivation, Engagement, and Thriving in User Experience (METUX) model, this paper argues that users’ psychological basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness should be put at the center of social robot design. These basic needs are essential to people’s psychological well-being, engagement, and self-motivation. However, current literature offers limited insights into how human–robot interactions are related to users’ experiences of the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs and thus, to their well-being and flourishing. We propose that a need-fulfillment perspective could be an inspiring lens for the design of social robots, including socially assistive robots. We conceptualize various ways in which a psychological need-fulfillment perspective may be incorporated into future human–robot interaction research and design, ranging from the interface level to the specific tasks performed by a robot or the user’s behavior supported by the robot. The paper discusses the implications of the framework for designing social robots that promote well-being, as well as the implications for future research

Robot education peers in a situated primary school study: personalisation promotes child learning

The benefit of social robots to support child learning in an educational context over an extended period of time is evaluated. Specifically, the effect of personalisation and adaptation of robot social behaviour is assessed. Two autonomous robots were embedded within two matched classrooms of a primary school for a continuous two week period without experimenter supervision to act as learning companions for the children for familiar and novel subjects. Results suggest that while children in both personalised and non-personalised conditions learned, there was increased child learning of a novel subject exhibited when interacting with a robot that personalised its behaviours, with indications that this benefit extended to other class-based performance. Additional evidence was obtained suggesting that there is increased acceptance of the personalised robot peer over a non-personalised version. These results provide the first evidence in support of peer-robot behavioural personalisation having a positive influence on learning when embedded in a learning environment for an extended period of time