Influence of Home Robots on Stress Relief Effectiveness in Communication between People Meeting for the First Time.

Introduction: Animal-assisted therapy, a complementary and alternative therapy to relieve the patient's stress, has been demonstrated to be fairly effective, although it can be implemented in limited medical institutions. We, therefore, substituted a robot for animals to examine its stress-relieving effects. Methods: Twenty-four healthy volunteers randomly assigned to the robot intervention and control groups chatted for 10 minutes. Before and after chatting, we conducted a questionnaire survey on their mental status using the Visual Analog Scale (VAS), evaluated the balance of the autonomic nervous system based on the analysis of heart rate variability, and measured the salivary levels of oxytocin and secretory immunoglobulin A. Results: Neither the VAS nor the salivary levels of physiologically active substances were significantly different between the groups. However, the balance of the autonomic nervous system showed a significant increase in the indices of parasympathetic nerve activity in the male subjects of the intervention group. Discussion: Short-term intervention did not sufficiently demonstrate the effects of robots in relieving stress, presumably because the stress relief effects of robot may be associated with the feelings of "attachment" and "trust." Conclusions: A long-term intervention study should be conducted to examine the usefulness of robots in relieving stress and improving the quality of life. If the usefulness of robot-assisted therapy is clarified, it could be widely implemented in clinical settings as an alternative to animal-assisted therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]