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Article published In: Child-Robot Interaction: Design, Evaluation, and Novel Solutions
Edited by Marta Couto, Shruti Chandra, Elmira Yadollahi and Vicky Charisi
[Interaction Studies 23:2] 2022
► pp. 157–203

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Measuring mental wellbeing of children via human-robot interaction

Challenges and opportunities

 | University of Cambridge
 | University of Cambridge
ORCiD logo with link | University of Cambridge
 | University of Cambridge
Published online: 24 March 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.21027.abb
Abstract
During the last decade, children have shown an increasing need for mental wellbeing interventions due to their anxiety and depression issues, which the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated. Socially Assistive Robotics have been shown to have a great potential to support children with mental wellbeing-related issues. However, understanding how robots can be used to aid the measurement of these issues is still an open challenge. This paper presents a narrative review of child-robot interaction (cHRI) papers (IEEE ROMAN proceedings from 2016–2021 and keyword-based article search using Google Scholar) to investigate the open challenges and potential knowledge gaps in the evaluation of mental wellbeing or the assessment of factors affecting mental wellbeing in children. We exploited the SPIDER framework to search for the key elements for the inclusion of relevant studies. Findings from this work (10 screened papers in total) investigate the challenges in cHRI studies about mental wellbeing by categorising the current research in terms of robot-related factors (robot autonomy and type of robot), protocol-related factors (experiment purpose, tasks, participants and user sensing) and data related factors (analysis and findings). The main contribution of this work is to highlight the potential opportunities for cHRI researchers to carry out measurements concerning children’s mental wellbeing.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Measurements of mental wellbeing in children
    • 2.2SARs and cHRI
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Term definitions
    • 3.2Search strategy
    • 3.3Selection of relevant publications
    • 3.4Data extraction and analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Functionality of the Robotised Setup
    • 4.2Protocol related limitations
    • 4.3Establishing less constrained/more naturalistic and prolonged interactions
    • 4.4Development of a validation protocol
  • 5.Challenges in cHRI
    • 5.1Functionality of the robotised setup
    • 5.2Protocol related limitations
    • 5.3Establishing longitudinal interactions
    • 5.4Development of a validation protocol
    • 5.5Ethical concerns regarding using social robots for measurements in children
    • 5.6Conducting multidisciplinary research in cHRI
  • 6.Opportunities in cHRI research for mental wellbeing
    • 6.1Using cHRI in mental wellbeing screening
    • 6.2Demographics relevant mental wellbeing screening in children
    • 6.3User sensing and cHRI experience evaluation
    • 6.4Remote robotised mental wellbeing screening
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (123)
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