Social Robots as Psychometric Tools for Cognitive Assessment: A Pilot Test

Abstract

Recent research demonstrated the benefits of employing robots as therapeutic assistants and caregivers, but very little is known on the use of robots as a tool for psychological assessment. Socially capable robots can provide many advantages to diagnostic practice: engage people, guarantee standardized administration and assessor neutrality, perform automatic recording of subject behaviors for further analysis by practitioners. In this paper, we present a pilot study on testing people's cognitive functioning via social interaction with a humanoid robot. To this end, we programmed a social robot to administer a psychometric tool for detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment, a risk factor for dementia, implementing the first prototype of robotic assistant for mass screening of elderly population. Finally, we present a pilot test of the robotic procedure with healthy adults that show promising results of the robotic test, also compared to its traditional paper version.

Psychometric Evaluation Supported by a Social Robot: Personality Factors and Technology Acceptance

“…Social humanoid robots have been successfully integrated into health-care to provide specialized treatments and services [1], but very few studies have been exploring the application of robotics in the diagnostic process. As shown in a previous work [2], a robot-assisted cognitive assessment could guarantee many advantages, in fact by design robots can guarantee test standardization and assessor neutrality. The use of humanoid social robots appears to be particularly useful in assisting professionals to detect initial signs of impairment by allowing large-scale screenings as robots can be deployed also outside the clinic.…”

“…As a result of the cognitive assessment, the robot will provide: i) an automatic score registered by the robot, with verbal transcriptions and audio/video recordings of the administration; and ii) a supervised score calculated by a psychologist through the recordings available, to obtain the actual score achieved by the user. Details on the development process can be found in [2].…”

“…The prototype used in the experiment presented in this article has been further developed: after the pilot test [2] the user feedback was used to improve the interaction and reliability; the multi-modal interface was translated in Italian, including a more expressive movement of the robot to provide additional cues for a more intuitive interaction, the sensitivity of the automatic score was tuned, and a sound was added to confirm the correct registration of user's answers.…”

A Taxonomy in Robot-Assisted Training: Current Trends, Needs and Challenges

“…Robot-Assisted Training systems have been successfully deployed as training assistants with applications in healthcare, physical and cognitive rehabilitation, education and personalized skill training. In the field of psychological and cognitive assessment, robots have been proposed as screening, assessment and training tools for cognitive functions and social skills [11][12][13]. A main advantage of such systems is the automation of well-established psychometric tools and tests, with the potential to provide users and experts with high-fidelity and standardized assessments.…”

“…Their results showed a high correlation between the robotic and the standard scores, indicating a promising validity of the proposed approach. In a similar application, a social robot has been proposed as a psychometric tool to assess cognitive functioning via social interaction with a humanoid robot [12]. The robot was deployed to administer a psychometric tool for detecting Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) in elderly users.…”