Towards Using Social HRI for Improving Children's Healthcare Experiences

Mary Ellen Foster, Ronald P. A. Petrick

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop a social robot designed to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. While robots have previously been trialled for this task, with promising initial results, the systems have tended to be teleoperated, limiting their flexibility and robustness. This project will use epistemic planning techniques as a core component for action selection in the robot system, in order to generate plans that include physical, sensory, and social actions for interacting with humans. The robot will operate in a task environment where appropriate and safe interaction with children, parents/caregivers, and healthcare professionals is required. In addition to addressing the core technical challenge of building an autonomous social robot, the project will incorporate co-design techniques involving all participant groups, and the final robot system will be evaluated in
a two-site clinical trial.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages5
Publication statusPublished - 13 Nov 2020
EventAAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Human-Robot Interaction 2020 - virtually
Duration: 13 Nov 202014 Nov 2020

Conference

ConferenceAAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Human-Robot Interaction 2020
Abbreviated titleAI-HRI 2020
Period13/11/2014/11/20

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