Search

Children encounter high levels of stress and anxiety before receiving medical treatment, such as a vaccination. This paper explores the effect of emotional gesturing in socially assistive robots (SARs) on children's observed and self-reported engagement, as well as self-reported anxiety, fear, and trust during a group vaccination. A total of 249 children interacted with the social robot iPal before and after receiving the vaccine. Our results show an overall positive effect of adding emotional gestures to a SAR's interaction behavior leading to increased engagement and lower anxiety, while increased engagement also resulted in trusting the robot more. Thus, adding emotional gestures during child-robot interaction is a powerful way to improve the child's experience during a group vaccination day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child and family care professionals in the Netherlands are facing challenges including high workloads. Technological support could be beneficial in this context, e.g. for education, motivation and guidance of the children. For example, the Dutch Child and Family Center explores the possibilities of social robot assistance in their regular care pathways. To study the use of social robots in this broad context, we started by drafting three example scenarios based on the expertise of child care professionals. During an exploration phase, we are identifying key design and application requirements through focus groups with child care professionals and parents. Later stages of our research, the testing phase, will focus on testing these requirements via scenario-based design and child-robot interaction experiments in real-world contexts to further shape the application of social robots in various child and family care settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robots will increasingly collaborate with human partners necessitating research into how robots negotiate negative collaborative outcomes. This study investigates the effect of blame attribution on trust assessments in human-robot collaboration. Participants (n = 60) collaboratively played a game with a humanoid robot in one of four conditions in a 2 (blame correctness: correct vs. incorrect) by 2 (blame target: human vs. robot) between-subjects experiment. Results show that people evaluate a robot more positively when it blames itself for collaborative failures, especially, it seems, in the case of incorrect self-blame. Our findings indicate a need to further research on effective communication strategies for robots that need to negotiate collaborative failures without compromising the trust relationships with its human partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HRI is an interdisciplinary field that requires researchers to be knowledgeable in broad areas ranging from social sciences to engineering. Study design is a multifaceted aspect of HRI that is hard to develop and perfect. Thus, the second edition of the "Workshop Your Study Design" workshop aims to improve the quality of future HRI studies by training researchers and boosting the accessibility of HRI as a field. Participants will have the opportunity to receive guidance and feedback on their study from an expert mentor. Researchers from all avenues of HRI will be invited to submit a 2-4 page paper on an HRI study they are currently designing, including a brief introduction and a complete methods section. Accepted submissions will be discussed in small groups led by mentors with relevant expertise. Prior to the workshop, papers will be shared within each group. Participants will be encouraged to read other submissions. During the workshop, attendees will work within their mentee-mentor groups to discuss each paper and provide feedback. There will also be a session where mentors lead mini discussions on topics important to study design, such as balancing qualitative and quantitative design, power analysis, and research ethics. The workshop will end with a session where all participants can share important lessons that they learned with fellow attendees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the experiences of Italian and Dutch children while interacting with a social robot that is designed to support their diabetes self-management. Observations of children's behaviors and analyses of questionnaires at diabetes camps, showed positive experiences with variation (e.g., Italian children seemed to be more open and expressive, and more close to the robot compared to the Dutch children). A culture-aware robot should be sensitive to such differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]