Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children’s Healthcare Experiences

Abstract

This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop an autonomous and responsive social robot designed to help children cope with painful procedures in hospital emergency departments. While this is an application domain where psychological interventions have been previously demonstrated to be effective at reducing pain and distress using a variety of devices and techniques, in recent years, social robots have been trialled in this area with promising initial results. However, until now, the social robots that have been tested have generally been teleoperated, which has limited their flexibility and robustness, as well as the potential to offer personalized, adaptive procedural support. Using co-design techniques, this project plans to define and validate the necessary robot behaviour together with participant groups that include children, parents and caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Identified behaviours will be deployed on a robot platform, incorporating AI reasoning techniques that will enable the robot to adapt autonomously to the child's behaviour. The final robot system will be evaluated through a two-site clinical trial. Throughout the project, we will also monitor and analyse the ethical and social implications of robotics and AI in paediatric healthcare.

Exploring the needs of children and caregivers to inform design of an artificial intelligence-enhanced social robot in the pediatric emergency department

“…This platform has been widely used in child-robot interaction studies [7,12,13,16]. Details of the overall project methodology have been previously published [17]. This current study specifically aimed to characterize children’s and caregivers’ (a) experiences of IVI-related pain and distress and (b) their perspectives surrounding integration of robots and AI within the pediatric healthcare context, to inform the design of this system.…”

On Using Action Inheritance and Modularity in PDDL Domain Modelling

“…Recent studies have demonstrated that social robots can be used to manage child pain and distress during medical procedures (Ali et al 2019;Trost et al 2019). We are part of a team developing a social robot underpinned by a planning system to be used in this setting (Foster et al 2020;Lindsay et al 2022). The scenario presents a significant challenge for a social robot: the system must coexist with multiple humans engaged in numerous high-priority and dynamic tasks.…”

Gender Fairness in Social Robotics: Exploring a Future Care of Peripartum Depression

“…2) Safeguarding a User-Centric Approach in Healthcare: Indeed, HRI does not have to include an AI-systemic interaction in terms of adaptability and learning, facial recognition or predictive abilities. However, the future social robotics definitely will integrate more AI-methodologies [61]. Therefore, the notions of governance of robots in diagnostic care would benefit from an inclusion of contemporary ideas on AI governance.…”