A Social Robot to Mitigate Stress, Anxiety, and Pain in Hospital Pediatric Care

Abstract

Children and their parents may undergo challenging experiences when admitted for inpatient care at pediatric hospitals. While most hospitals make efforts to provide socio-emotional support for patients and their families during care, gaps still exist between human resource supply and demand. The Huggable project aims to close this gap by creating a social robot able to mitigate stress, anxiety, and pain in pediatric patients by engaging them in playful interactive activities. In this paper, we introduce a larger experimental design to compare the effects of the Huggable robot to a virtual character on a screen and a plush teddy bear, and provide initial qualitative analyses of patients' and parents' behaviors during intervention sessions collected thus far. We demonstrate preliminarily that children are more eager to emotionally connect with and be physically activated by a robot than a virtual character, illustrating the potential of social robots to provide socio-emotional support during inpatient pediatric care.

Measuring young children's long-term relationships with social robots

“…Social robots are increasingly being developed for use with children in application domains such as education, entertainment, healthcare, and therapy [11,14,21,28,41]. In these domains, because learning and behavior change may take weeks or months to achieve, the robot interactions must necessarily move toward longer-term encounters.…”

Intelligent and Interactive Companion Combined With Wearable Technology and Re-creatable Environment to Avoid Anxiety

“…Paro is a seal robot which is produced to reduce the stress level and improve psychological outcomes for elderly residents in a care-house [11]. Huggable is a social robot designed to mitigate stress, anxiety and pain in children and parents at pediatric hospitals [12]. These studies show that a pet like companion can become a stress and anxiety reducer for the user.…”

“…Companion which interacts with the user and captures moments (iii) Built environment which simulates the captured moments Since companions such as Emobie [10] and Huggable [12] are studied with child users, Paro [11] is studied with adult users and wearable technologies are not limited to a specific user group, the proposed technology will be appropriate for a wide range of users. Also within the study it would be possible to identify the factors that need to be calibrated or customized for different types of user groups.…”

Automatic recognition of touch gestures in the corpus of social touch

“…Also, the addition of tactile interaction can benefit robot therapy in which robots are used to comfort people in stressful environments, for instance, children in hospitals [19] and elderly people in nursing homes [37].…”