Teleoperated Robot Coaching for Mindfulness Training: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Social robots are becoming incorporated in daily human lives, assisting in the promotion of the physical and mental wellbeing of individuals. To investigate the design and use of social robots for delivering mindfulness training, we develop a teleoperation framework that enables an experienced Human Coach (HC) to conduct mindfulness training sessions virtually, by replicating their upper-body and head movements onto the Pepper robot, in real-time. Pepper's vision is mapped onto a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) worn by the HC and a bidirectional audio pipeline is set up, enabling the HC to communicate with the participants through the robot. To evaluate the participants' perceptions of the teleoperated Robot Coach (RC), we study the interactions between a group of participants and the RC over 5 weeks and compare these with another group of participants interacting directly with the HC. Growth modelling analysis of this longitudinal data shows that the HC ratings are consistently greater than 4 (on a scale of 1 − 5) for all aspects while an increase is witnessed in the RC ratings over the weeks, for the Robot Motion and Conversation dimensions. Mindfulness training delivered by both types of coaching evokes positive responses from the participants across all the sessions, with the HC rated significantly higher than the RC on Animacy, Likeability and Perceived Intelligence. Participants' personality traits such as Conscientiousness and Neuroticism are found to influence their perception of the RC. These findings enable an understanding of the differences between the perceptions of HC and RC delivering mindfulness training, and provide insights towards the development of robot coaches for improving the psychological wellbeing of individuals.

Human-Robot Relationship: long-term effects on disclosure, perception and well-being

“…These findings provide further valuable evidence for the positive outcomes of employing a social robot as an intervention supporting people's well-being. Moreover, our results here add to previous studies [e.g., 33,42,105] that show the benefits of using robots for emotional support. Taken together with other results from this study (i.e., that people self-disclose increasingly more to a social robot over time and that people perceive a robot as more social over time), this study provides crucial evidence for establishing relationships with robots in health and care settings.…”

“…Due to the constrained and highly choreographed nature of many HRI studies, deep insights into people's responses and interactions with robots in natural settings remain relatively rare. Of the field studies that have conducted HRI research in these spaces, important insights are emerging from both single interaction [e.g., 25,26] and repeated interaction [e.g., [27][28][29][30][31][32][33] studies, with much of this work taking place in public spaces or tied to specific settings like education [e.g., 31,[34][35][36][37][38], care [e.g., 32,33,[39][40][41][42], or rehabilitation [e.g., 27,30,[43][44][45][46]. Longitudinal studies that address similar questions with disembodied agents such as virtual assistants and chatbots [e.g., [47][48][49] benefit from access to users' personal devices, whereas research with physically embodied artificial agents (i.e., social robots) remains far rarer due to challenges with logistical and cost barriers to situating these devices in users' domestic settings (i.e., in their home environment) to explore single or repeated interactions.…”

“…Previous studies administered the application of social robots in emotionally supportive settings showing meaningful outcomes in terms of cognitive change and affect. A study by Bodala and colleagues [42] employed a social robot delivering teleoperated mindfulness coaching for five weeks. Another example by Axelsson and colleagues [56] tested a robotic coach conducting positive psychology exercises, showing positive mood change after participation in the robotic intervention.…”

“…In addition, the act of self-disclosure is highly useful for emotional introspective process, self-reflection on one's emotions, actions, and behaviours [74], and is a meaningful act of mindfulness [75]. In the previous section, we mentioned several studies applying social robots in emotionally supportive settings [see 33,42,56], but social robotic interventions rarely encourage open self-disclosure. Considering the vast evidence for the positive effect of self-disclosure on emotional well-being, our behavioural paradigm was aimed at encouraging participants to selfdisclose to a social robot as a therapeutic activity.…”

Participatory Design of a Robotic Mental Well-being Coach

“…We investigate requirements for a potential robotic platform that can promote mental well-being by delivering wellbeing interventions (some of which have been described above in Section A). For this purpose, we designed a study where participants who took part in either a [19] or a SFP study were invited for an individual interview and a focus group discussion. However, these previous HRI studies are not examined as part of the study presented here.…”