Integrating Robot Support Functions into Varied Activities at Returning Hospital Visits: Supporting Child’s Self-Management of Diabetes

Persistent progress in the self-management of their disease is important and challenging for children with diabetes. The European ALIZ-e project developed and tested a set of core functions for a social robot that may help to establish such progress. These functions were studied in different set-ups and with different groups of children (e.g....

Effects of a robotic storyteller's moody gestures on storytelling perception

A parameterized behavior model was developed for robots to show mood during task execution. In this study, we applied the model to the coverbal gestures of a robotic storyteller. This study investigated whether parameterized mood expression can 1) show mood that is changing over time; 2) reinforce affect communication when other modalities exist...

Mood contagion of robot body language in human robot interaction

The aim of our work is to design bodily mood expressions of humanoid robots for interactive settings that can be recognized by users and have (positive) effects on people who interact with the robots. To this end, we develop a parameterized behavior model for humanoid robots to express mood through body language. Different settings of the...

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...

Child’s perception of robot’s emotions: Effects of platform, context and experience

Social robots may comfort and support children who have to cope with chronic diseases like diabetes. In social interactions, it is important to be able to express recognizable emotions. Studies show that the iCat robot, with its humanoid facial features, has this capability. In this paper we look if a Nao robot, without humanoid facial features,...

Robot mood is contagious: Effects of robot body language in the imitation game

Mood contagion is an automatic mechanism that induces a congruent mood state by means of the observation of another person's emotional expression. In this paper, we address the question whether robot mood displayed during an imitation game can (a) be recognized by participants and (b) produce contagion effects. Robot mood was displayed by...

Bodily mood expression: Recognize moods from functional behaviors of humanoid robots

Our goal is to develop bodily mood expression that can be used during the execution of functional behaviors for humanoid social robots. Our model generates such expression by stylizing behaviors through modulating behavior parameters within functional bounds. We have applied this approach to two behaviors, waving and pointing, and obtained...

The relative importance and interrelations between behavior parameters for robots' mood expression

Bodily expression of affect is crucial to human robot interaction. Our work aims at designing bodily expression of mood that does not interrupt ongoing functional behaviors. We propose a behavior model containing specific (pose and motion) parameters that characterize the behavior. Parameter modulation provides behavior variations through which...

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...

Child-robot interaction in the wild: Advice to the aspiring experimenter

We present insights gleaned from a series of child-robot interaction experiments carried out in a hospital paediatric department. Our aim here is to share good practice in experimental design and lessons learned about the implementation of systems for social HRI with child users towards application in "the wild", rather than in tightly...

The use of robots in social behavior tutoring for children with ASD

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) may benefit from 'self care' solutions which use social robotics principles. Specifically, the authors propose to use robots in various ways to help such children with the acquisition and training of important pragmatic social behaviors, for example greetings. In order to create such a learning...

Robots that care

Many countries face pressure on their health care systems. To alleviate this pressure, 'self care' and 'self monitoring' are often stimulated with the use of new assistive technologies. Social robotics is a research area where robotic technology is optimized for various social functions. One of these functions is self care assistance. To foster...