Education by a social robot on nutrition and catheter care in pediatric oncology patients

PURPOSE

To improve knowledge on nutrition and catheter care in children with cancer by an educational intervention with a social robot.

METHODS

We conducted a cohort study on pediatric cancer patients in a high complexity Hospital in Bogotá, Colombia. We included 14 patients (8-17 years old) who underwent an educational intervention with the help of a humanoid robot (Nao V6). The robot was programmed to transmit educational messages about self-care in feeding and using the central venous catheter. A survey with yes-no questions was administered before and after the intervention.

RESULTS

We found an improvement in understanding of the subject matter related to nutrition and catheter care, when comparing the knowledge on topics before and after the educational intervention (p < .001).

CONCLUSION

Education by a social robot on nutrition and catheter care showed a positive effect on children's knowledge on these topics. Therefore, it potentially decreases the risk of poor feeding habits and inadequate central venous catheter management, and improves adherence to recommendations and quality of life.

Perspectives of Healthcare Providers to Inform the Design of an AI-Enhanced Social Robot in the Pediatric Emergency Department

Children commonly experience pain and distress in healthcare settings related to medical procedures such as blood tests and intravenous insertions (IVIs). Inadequately addressed pain and distress can result in both short- and long-term negative consequences. The use of socially assistive robotics (SARs) to reduce procedure-related distress and pain in children's healthcare settings has shown promise; however, the current options lack autonomous adaptability. This study presents a descriptive qualitative needs assessment of healthcare providers (HCPs) in two Canadian pediatric emergency departments (ED) to inform the design an artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced social robot to be used as a distraction tool in the ED to facilitate IVIs. Semi-structured virtual individual and focus group interviews were conducted with eleven HCPs. Four main themes were identified: (1) common challenges during IVIs (i.e., child distress and resource limitations), (2) available tools for pain and distress management during IVIs (i.e., pharmacological and non-pharmacological), (3) response to SAR appearance and functionality (i.e., personalized emotional support, adaptive distraction based on child's preferences, and positive reinforcement), and (4) anticipated benefits and challenges of SAR in the ED (i.e., ensuring developmentally appropriate interactions and space limitations). HCPs perceive AI-enhanced social robots as a promising tool for distraction during IVIs in the ED.

Field Trial of a Shopworker Robot with Friendly Guidance and Appropriate Admonishments

We developed an admonishing service for a shopworker robot and conducted a field trial to investigate the impressions of a shop’s staff and customers. Applying the admonishing service in a real-world robot is difficult due to the high risk of rejection by society. We wanted to achieve an acceptable admonishing service while simultaneously avoiding the impression of a forceful request from a machine. We proposed a harmonized design that provided friendly and admonishing services. First, we interviewed a shop’s staff to learn their strategies for both friendly and admonishing services. From our evaluation of the interview results, we derived three design principles: friendly impressions, zero erroneous admonishments, and polite requests. Based on the design principles, we implemented our harmonized design on a social robot that guides customers to product locations and admonishes those who are not wearing face masks. We conducted a 13-day field trial in a retail shop and interviewed the customers and shopworkers to learn their impressions of our robot. The results of the field trial imply that our harmonized design approach is successful. Both the customers and the shop staff had overall positive impressions of the robot, its admonishing and friendly services, and expressed an intention to use it in the future. Furthermore, we studied the robot’s autonomous service-providing capability in the field and conducted an evaluation with hired participants to deepen our study of the robot’s mask recognition capability.

Caregiver Views on Prospective Use of Robotic Care in Helping Children Adapt to Hospitalization

Children in hospitals endure a variety of stressful situations. Children feel friendly toward and have fun with robots. Care robots are considered to be an alternate technique to relieve stress after hospitalization. A mixed-methods study was conducted on caregivers to understand the ideal care robot. One hundred and fifty caregivers of pediatric patients participated in a quantitative online survey, and eleven participated in focus group interviews for qualitative analysis. Quantitative data underwent descriptive statistics. Content analysis was conducted for qualitative data. Regarding the overall awareness and necessity of a care robot, the caregivers thought it would help patients adapt to the hospital environment more quickly. The caregivers' preferred character-shaped robots of child height. For sound, they preferred an animated character's voice. For movement, they preferred the robot to roll on wheels. Regarding functions, medicine was the item for which they most wanted to use game elements. For the educational element, the caregivers wanted to teach children the reasons for and methods of medicine administration. Four themes were derived from the qualitative results. The findings are expected to contribute to the future development of care robots that can assist pediatric patients.

Robotics in Clinical and Developmental Psychology

Technological advances in robotics over the last 20 years have allowed us to explore the use of robots in different healthcare contexts, in which robots can be deployed as tools for intervention and rehabilitation programs. This chapter intends to analyze, in a lifespan perspective (childhood, adulthood, and elderly age), the potentialities that the use of robots can offer in clinical practices without neglecting the robot's technical constraints and the methodological limitations of the studies. We will provide suggestions for future research and indications for the clinical application of robots according to the different pathologies and ages.

Human-Like Robots and the Uncanny Valley

Abstract. In the field of human-robot interaction, the well-known uncanny valley hypothesis proposes a curvilinear relationship between a robot’s degree of human likeness and the observers’ responses to the robot. While low to medium human likeness should be associated with increased positive responses, a shift to negative responses is expected for highly anthropomorphic robots. As empirical findings on the uncanny valley hypothesis are inconclusive, we conducted a random-effects meta-analysis of 49 studies (total N = 3,556) that reported 131 evaluations of robots based on the Godspeed scales for anthropomorphism (i.e., human likeness) and likeability. Our results confirm more positive responses for more human-like robots at low to medium anthropomorphism, with moving robots rated as more human-like but not necessarily more likable than static ones. However, because highly anthropomorphic robots were sparsely utilized in previous studies, no conclusions regarding proposed adverse effects at higher levels of human likeness can be made at this stage.

Using social robot NAO for emotional support to children at a paediatric emergency department: a randomised clinical trial

Background

Social robots (SRs) have been used for improving anxiety in children in stressful clinical situations, such as during painful procedures. However, no studies have yet been performed to assess their effect in children while waiting for emergency room consultations.

Objective

This study aims to assess the impact of SRs on managing stress in children waiting for an emergency room procedure through the assessment of salivary cortisol levels.

Methods

This was an open randomized clinical trial in children attending a pediatric emergency department. Children accessing the emergency room were randomized to 1 of 3 groups: (1) playing with a NAO SR, (2) playing with a study nurse, or (3) waiting with parents. The salivary cortisol levels of all children were measured through a swab. Salivary cortisol levels before and after the intervention were compared in the 3 groups. We calculated the effect size of our interventions through the Cohen d-based effect size correlation (r).

Results

A total of 109 children aged 3-10 years were enrolled in the study, and 94 (86.2%) had complete data for the analyses. Salivary cortisol levels significantly decreased more in the group exposed to robot interaction than in the other two groups (r=0.75). Cortisol levels decreased more in girls (r=0.92) than in boys (r=0.57).

Conclusions

SRs are efficacious in decreasing stress in children accessing the emergency room and may be considered a tool for improving emotional perceptions of children and their families in such a critical setting.

Trial Registration

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04627909; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT04627909

Reducing negative emotions in children using social robots: systematic review

BACKGROUND

For many children, visiting the hospital can lead to a state of increased anxiety. Social robots are being explored as a possible tool to reduce anxiety and distress in children attending a clinical or hospital environment. Social robots are designed to communicate and interact through movement, music and speech.

OBJECTIVE

This systematic review aims at assessing the current evidence on the types of social robots used and their impact on children's anxiety or distress levels when visiting the hospital for outpatient appointments or planned admissions.

METHODS

Databases such as MEDLINE, PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Web of Science, PsychINFO and Google Scholar were queried for papers published between January 2009 and August 2020 reporting the use of social robots interacting with children in hospital or clinical environments.

RESULTS

A total of 10 studies were located and included. Across these 10 studies, 7 different types of robots were used. Anxiety and distress were found to be reduced in the children who interacted with a social robot.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, the evidence suggests that social robots hold a promising role in reducing levels of anxiety or distress in children visiting the hospital. However, research on social robots is at an early stage and requires further studies to strengthen the evidence base.

“Does cinema form the future of robotics?”: a survey on fictional robots in sci-fi movies

Abstract

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have always been among the most popular topics in science fiction (sci-fi) movies. This paper endeavors to review popular movies containing Fictional Robots (FR) to extract the most common characteristics and interesting design ideas of robots portrayed in science fiction. To this end, 134 sci-fi films, including 108 unique FRs, were investigated regarding the robots’ different design aspects (e.g., appearance design, interactive design and artificial intelligence, and ethical and social design). Also, in each section of this paper, some characteristics of FRs are compared with real social robots. Since some researches point to the significant role of the cinema in forming the community’s expectations, it is very important to consider these characteristics and differences in choosing the future pathway of robotics. As some examples of findings, we have found that unlike the non-metallic skins/covers of real social robots, most FRs are still covered by highly detailed metal components. Moreover, the FR ability of interactions are generally (more than 90%) shown to be similar or even more advanced than normal Human–Human interactions, and this milestone was achieved by ignoring the AI challenges of real HRI. On the other hand, the ethical aspects of movies do inspire us to consider the potential ethical aspects of real robot design. All in all, according to popularity of movies, studying FR could be a step toward more appropriate development of robotics and AI entities to be accepted by general users in the real world.

Highlights:

Perspectives of Child Life Specialists After Many Years of Working With a Humanoid Robot in a Pediatric Hospital: Narrative Design

Background

Child life specialists (CLSs) play an important role in supporting patients and their families during their visits to a children’s hospital. Although CLSs are equipped with considerable expertise to support families during some of the most difficult moments of their lives, we introduced an additional resource to them in the form of a humanoid robot named MEDi.

Objective

The aim of this study is to explore the experiences of CLSs using a robot to support children.

Methods

We interviewed 7 CLSs who had worked with this robot for several years. The transcribed interviews were analyzed using open and axial coding.

Results

The first main theme that emerged was the process of navigating from fear to friendship in learning to use a humanoid robot for therapeutic support. The second major theme was MEDi as a source of connection and support to children. CLSs’ perceptions of MEDi as an adaptable resource and working with the limits of MEDi constituted the last 2 themes.

Conclusions

These descriptions show how CLSs can incorporate a robot into their practice.

Social Robotics, Education, and Religion in the Islamic World: An Iranian Perspective

The social impact of robotics applied to domains such as education, religion, nursing, and therapy across the world depends on the level of technology as well as the culture in which it is used. By studying how robots are used in Iran, a technologically-savvy country with a long history and a rich culture, we explore their possible impact on interrelated areas of religious and ethical features in education in an Islamic society. To accomplish this task, a preliminary exploratory study was conducted using two social robots as teaching assistants in Islamic religion classes for 42 elementary students. More than 90% of the participants in the study absolutely preferred the robot-assisted religion class over one taught by a human. Building on the results from the students' viewpoints and exam scores, the acceptability and potential of using social robots in the education of Islamic religious concepts in Iran are further discussed in this paper.

Trust in and Ethical Design of Carebots: The Case for Ethics of Care

The paper has two main objectives: to examine the challenges arising from the use of carebots as well as to discuss how the design of carebots can deal with these challenges. First, it notes that the use of carebots to take care of the physical and mental health of the elderly, children and the disabled as well as to serve as assistive tools and social companions encounter a few main challenges. They relate to the extent of the care robots’ ability to care for humans, potential deception by robot morphology and communications, (over)reliance on or attachment to robots, and the risks of carebot use without informed consent and potential infringements of privacy. Secondly, these challenges impinge upon issues of ethics and trust which are somewhat overlapping in terms of concept and practice. The existing ethical guidelines, standards and regulations are general in nature and lack a central ethical framework and concrete principles applicable to the care contexts. Hence, to deal with these important challenges, it is proposed in the third part of the paper that carebots be designed by taking account of Ethics of Care as the central ethical framework. It argues that the Ethics of Care offer the following advantages: (a) it provides sufficiently concrete principles and embodies values that are sensitive and applicable to the design of carebots and the contexts of caring practices; (b) it coheres with the tenets of Principlism and select ethical theories (utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics); and (c) it is closely associated with the preservation and maintenance of trust.

A Case Study of Adding Proactivity in Indoor Social Robots Using Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) Model

The rise of robots and robotics has proved to be a benefaction to humankind in different aspects. Robotics evolved from a simple button, has seen massive development over the years. Consequently, it has become an integral part of human life as robots are used for a wide range of applications ranging from indoor uses to interplanetary missions. Recently, the use of social robots, in commercial indoor spaces to offer help or social interaction with people, has been quite popular. As such, taking the increasing use of social robots into consideration, many works have been carried out to develop the robots to make them capable of acting like humans. The notion behind this development is the need for robots to offer services without being asked. Social robots should think more like humans and suggest possible and suitable actions by analyzing the environment where they are. Belief-desire-intention (BDI) is one of the most popular models for developing rational agents based on how humans act based on the information derived from an environment. As such, this work defines a foundation architecture to integrate a BDI framework into a social robot to add "act like a human" feature for proactive behaviors. The work validates the proposed architecture by developing a vision-based proactive action using the PROFETA BDI framework in an indoor social robot, Waldo, operated by the robot operating system (ROS).