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We are developing a social robot that helps children with diabetes Type 1 to acquire self-management skills and routines. There is a diversity of Behavior Change Techniques (BCTs) and guidelines that seem to be useful for the development of such support, but it is not yet clear how to work out the techniques into concrete robot support functions and behaviors. The situated Cognitive Engineering (sCE) methodology provides guidance for the design and evaluation of such functions and behaviors, but doesn’t provide a univocal specification method of the theoretical and empirical justification. This paper presents an extension of sCE: a formal template that describes the relations between support objectives, behavior change theory, design specifications and evaluation outcomes, called situated Design Rationale (sDR) and the method to get this. As test case, the European ALIZ-e project is used to instantiate this design rationale and to evaluate the usage. This case study showed that sDR provides concrete guidance (1) to derive robot functions and behaviors from the theory and (2) to designate the corresponding effects with evaluation instruments. Furthermore, it helps to establish an effective, incremental and iterative, design and evaluation process, by relating positive and negative evaluation outcomes to robot behaviors at the task and communication level. The proposed solution for explicating the design rationale makes it possible for others to understand the decisions made and thereby supports replicating experiments or reusing parts of the design rationale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Society is facing a global shortage of 17 million health care workers, along with increasing health care demands from a growing number of older adults. Social robots are being considered as solutions to part of this problem.Objective: Our objective is to evaluate the quality of care perceived by patients and caregivers for an integrated care pathway in an outpatient clinic using a social robot for patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) interviews versus the currently used professional interviews.Methods: A multicenter, two-parallel-group, nonblinded, randomized controlled trial was used to test for noninferiority of the quality of care delivered through robot-assisted care. The randomization was performed using a computer-generated table. The setting consisted of two outpatient clinics, and the study took place from July to December 2019. Of 419 patients who visited the participating outpatient clinics, 110 older patients met the criteria for recruitment. Inclusion criteria were the ability to speak and read Dutch and being assisted by a participating health care professional. Exclusion criteria were serious hearing or vision problems, serious cognitive problems, and paranoia or similar psychiatric problems. The intervention consisted of a social robot conducting a 36-item PROM. As the main outcome measure, the customized Consumer Quality Index (CQI) was used, as reported by patients and caregivers for the outpatient pathway of care.Results: In total, 75 intermediately frail older patients were included in the study, randomly assigned to the intervention and control groups, and processed: 36 female (48%) and 39 male (52%); mean age 77.4 years (SD 7.3), range 60-91 years. There was no significant difference in the total patient CQI scores between the patients included in the robot-assisted care pathway (mean 9.27, SD 0.65, n=37) and those in the control group (mean 9.00, SD 0.70, n=38): P=.08, 95% CI -0.04 to 0.58. There was no significant difference in the total CQI scores between caregivers in the intervention group (mean 9.21, SD 0.76, n=30) and those in the control group (mean 9.09, SD 0.60, n=35): P=.47, 95% CI -0.21 to 0.46. No harm or unintended effects occurred.Conclusions: Geriatric patients and their informal caregivers valued robot-assisted and nonrobot-assisted care pathways equally.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT03857789; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03857789. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]