Developing a Social Conversational Robot for the Hospital waiting room

Possible applications for Social Robots in health-care settings, that could have a tremendous social impact in helping alleviating staff workload, are those of a patient-facing role such as robot receptionist, providing assistance to patients and visitors. Examples of functions that such robots would need to be able to execute are greeting visitors, reception check-in/out of patients, answering common questions they may have, showing them where to sit, helping them locate missing objects, providing directions to facilities, guiding them to different locations, etc. In this paper we describe current progress towards developing a multimodal conversational AI system integrated in a Social Conversational Robot (an ARI robot) that will act as a receptionist in a hospital waiting room. We present the developed architecture of the system and report on an initial experimental validation study carried out in laboratory conditions with the ARI robot.