Emotional and Behavioural Distraction by a Social Robot for Children Anxiety Reduction During Vaccination
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Emotional and Behavioural Distraction by a Social Robot for Children Anxiety Reduction During Vaccination Silvia Rossi1
· Marwa Larafa2 · Martina Ruocco3
Accepted: 14 December 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Social Assistive Robots are starting to be widely used for paediatric health-care. In this setting, the development of effective strategies to engage and remain compelling during the interaction is still an open research area since, in the case of an incoming medical procedure, children could be in an anxiety state. In this work, the proposed strategy relies on the use of a social robot interacting with the children and applying distraction strategies that are used in human–human interaction. Additionally, the robot displays emotional behaviours to attract the children attention. We present the results of a 2 months study (N = 139) conducted in a Health-Vaccines Centre, where the effects of the distraction provided by a social robot, showing such interactive behaviours interleaved with emotional ones, are compared with the same distracting strategies without any emotional social cues and with the case without the robot. Such emotional behaviours are selected with a positive or negative valence according to the initial anxiety state of the children (e.g., low or high). Outcome criteria for the evaluation of the intervention included the parents reported fear, anxiety and happiness at different stages of the interaction, self-report of the perceived pain, and an external behavioural evaluation of the pain. Results showed that the robot distraction strategies were able to reduce fear and anxiety, and increase happiness in every condition. Moreover, children perceived less pain with respect to the case of no robot. Finally, results showed that the initial children anxiety has an impact on the ability of the robot to be engaging. Keywords Emotional behaviour · SAR in healthcare · Attention · Anxiety
1 Introduction Technology is becoming increasingly used in health-care to improve the quality of life of patients, but it is also shaping the practices of health-care professionals. Robots are part of the process especially in the case of providing assistance to weak or vulnerable subjects, such as children and elders. In particular, Social Assistive Robots (SAR) are starting to be widely used for paediatric health-care. With respect to the use of applications running on cell-phone and tablets,
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Silvia Rossi [email protected] Martina Ruocco [email protected]
1
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
2
Department of Experimental Medicine, University of Perugia, Terni, Italy
3
School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
SAR has been shown to increase the likeability and the naturalness of the interaction, and provide an help in accepting advises [20,31]. What makes these machines more useful and capable of a better performance, compared to the others instruments, that are ch
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