Social robot as mindfulness tool for children

Abstract

Nowadays, robot technology use has spread everywhere, including usage by children in education, healthcare, and entertainment contexts. Research with social robots for children’s healthcare is a growing research field that has already shown great potential in both feasibil- ity and effectiveness respects such as being a distraction during flu vaccination and reducing anxiety, depression and anger symptoms after robot assisted therapy sessions. Adverse events like the COVID-19 pandemic affect children’s mental health. Despite the benefits, social isola- tion, used to mitigate the spread of the disease, significantly impacted children’s mental. Such impacts included fear of asking about the epidemics and relatives’ health, poor sleep, night- mares, poor appetite, physical discomfort, agitation and inattention, and clinginess, among other psychological conditions observed in related literature. Mindfulness exercises can work as a tool to enhance children’s mental health by increasing personal insight and decreasing repetitive negative thinking (e.g., rumination, worry and concerns). Yoga practice is benefi- cial since it also includes physical activity. This research objective was to investigate, design, develop, and test an application using a social robot for children. The robot is supposed to be a companion and guide the child through a mindfulness yoga practice activity. The social robot model used was the Zenbo Junior from ASUSTeK Computer Inc. This work describes the Human-Centered Design (HCD) stages for application development, named inspiration, ideation, and implementation, and details of application aspects, such as requirements, script- ing, workflow, features and system architecture. It also covers user tests, interview scripts, setup, data-gathering methods, and results. The user tests consisted of a single session includ- ing 14 children (8 girls, 6 boys) and 8 parents/guardians (5 female, 3 male). Quantitative data from System Usability Scale (SUS) (75,71 for children and 80,31 for guardians) and qualitative data from observation and semi-structured interviews analysis indicate that the sample well accepted the application. Children were captivated by the guided physical activity accompanied by the social robot. In future, this study plans to perform a long-term investigation, including other mindfulness activities and more accessible features. Furthermore, a systematic review of state of the art can increase the present contribution impact.