Emotional Distraction for Children Anxiety Reduction During Vaccination

Interaction Matters: The Effect of Touching the Social Robot PARO on Pain and Stress is Stronger When Turned ON vs. OFF

“…Our findings are in line with previous studies which found that human-robot social interaction is effective in diminishing clinical pain. This effect was found in studies where the HRI was without any physical contact with the robot (Beran et al, 2013;Yasemin et al, 2016;Ruocco et al, 2019;Trost et al, 2020;Smakman et al, 2021) as well as in studies where the HRI involved touch (Such as hugging the robot and/or stroking it) (Tanaka et al, 2012;Eskander et al, 2013;Okita, 2013;Pu et al, 2019). In our previous experiment (Geva et al, 2020) we demonstrated that touching a social robot is more effective for pain reduction than social interaction with the robot that does not include physical contact.…”

“…For example, several studies demonstrated that HRI can increase positive emotions among healthy participants (Crossman et al, 2018;Geva et al, 2020;Hoffmann and Krämer, 2021). HRI was also found to reduce student stress during final exams (Edwards et al, 2020), reduce stress and anxiety among hospitalized children undergoing a medical procedure (Beran et al, 2013;Okita, 2013;Beran et al, 2015;Ruocco et al, 2019;Trost et al, 2019;Trost et al, 2020;Smakman et al, 2021) and among older adults living in senior healthcare settings (Góngora Alonso et al, 2019;Pu et al, 2019). It is important to note that all the mentioned studies did not report the role of plain touch compared to social touch in HRI.…”