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

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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 a personal assistant could help. A personal assistant can have many different appearances. E.g. it can be a computer or a robot. When it is a computer, the assistance can be given in text, in speech or both, and by a standard chat application or a virtual agent. This thesis gives guidelines for supporting self-care and shows how it could be incorporated in a (embodied) personal assistant. First guidelines were derived from motivational interviewing, persuasive technology, and from existing guidelines for personal assistants. Two guidelines were found, be empathetic and be trustworthy. The first guideline is derived from Motivational Interviewing and can be reached by having ten skills. We only implemented three skills at most in the personal assistants due to time and technical constraints. The skills were implemented in a text interface, a virtual agent, and an embodied agent taking into account the technical constraints of the different assistants. The hypotheses were that the guidelines could be better incorporated in an agent than in a text interface, and that an embodied and social agent would incorporate the guidelines better than respectively a virtual and non social agent. Two experiments (N=6 and N=24) were done in a Wizard of Oz setting. In both experiments the participants worked with a text interface based assistant, a socially intelligent agent, and a non-socially intelligent agent. There were two groups in the experiments, the participants that worked with the virtual agent and the participants that worked with the embodied agent. The hypotheses were tested with questionnaires and by scoring video data on the social behavior of the participants towards the personal assistants. The first experiment proved that it is possible to have the same conversation with a robot as with a text interface. The second experiment showed that a text interface based personal assistant is just as trustworthy as an agent, but less empathetic. The socially intelligent virtual agent proved to incorporate the guidelines best and the non-socially intelligent embodied agent proved to incorporate the guidelines worst. These first experiments were performed with non diabetics, in the future we would like to perform an experiment with elderly that have diabetes.

The situated Design Rationale: of a social robot for child's disease self-management

A young boy with type 1 Diabetes Mellitus is supported by a social robot on the road to self-management. The robot has knowledge on the goals that the boy needs to reach, as discussed with his health care professional. The robot also knows the boy’s activity options and preferences. It suggests activities based on this knowledge, but also encourages the boy to try new approaches. For parents, such a social robot means that they can be less teacher and more parent and for the health care professionals it means they can focus on the emotional aspects instead of the knowledge aspects during visits.Finally, the boy sees the robot as something that is fun and a peer in contrast to someone/something with a higher authority. The robot supports relatedness and a feeling of competence, the different activities provide a feeling of autonomy, and less budding of the parents reduces stress for the whole family. This all supports that the boy sees diabetesas his own responsibility and feels that he has enough competence and autonomy to take care of diabetes himself. In support of this vision we look in this thesis at the design and evaluation of a social robot.Interactive Intelligenc

Developing a model of cognitive lockup for user interface engineering

This paper presents the development of a cognitive model of cognitive lockup: the tendency of humans to deal with disturbances sequentially, possibly overseeing crucial data from unattended resources so that serious task failures can appear—e.g., in a cockpit or control centre. The proposed model should support the design and evaluation of user interfaces that prevent such failures, being used outside the academic community. Based on the practical cognitive task load theory of Neerincx (2003), this model distinguishes time pressure and number of tasks-to-do as two factors that increase task switch costs and the corresponding risk of cognitive lock-up. The CASCaS architecture proved to fit best with the requirements to incorporate these factors and to support the UI engineering process

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 va- lence value, which are in uenced by the emotional state of its interaction partner and emotional occurrences such as win- ning a game. It expresses these emotions through its voice, posture, whole body poses, eye colour and gestures. An ex- periment with 18 children (mean age 9) and two Nao robots was conducted to study the in uence of adaptive emotion expression on the interaction behaviour and opinions of chil- dren. In a within-subjects design the children played a quiz with both an a ective robot using the model for adaptive emotion expression and a non-a ective robot without this model. The a ective robot reacted to the emotions of the child using the implementation of the model, the emotions of the child were interpreted by aWizard 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

Face to face interaction with an intelligent virtual agent: The effect on learning tactical picture compilation

Learning a process control task, such as tactical picture compilation in the Navy, is difficult, because the students have to spend their limited cognitive resources both on the complex task itself and the act of learning. In addition to the resource limits, motivation can be reduced when learning progress is slow. Intelligent Virtual Agents may help to improve tutoring systems by offering a student feedback on their performance via speech and facial expression, which imposes limited "communication load" and motivating ways of interaction. We present our Intelligent Virtual Agent, called Ashley, and an experiment in which we examined whether learning of tactical picture compilation is better when the feedback is provided by Ashley compared to a standard text-box interface. This first experiment did not show user interface effects, but provided new requirements for the next version of the feedback system and Ashley: The task to learn was yet too simple for substantial feedback effects, and the timing of Ashley's feedback should be improved, and Ashley's presence should be better scheduled. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg