Laura Aymerich-Franch

Laura Aymerich-Franch, Iliana Ferrer

One of the major areas where social robots are finding their place in society is for healthcare-related applications. Yet, very little research has mapped the deployment of socially assistive robots (SARs) in real settings. Using a documentary research method, we were able to trace back 279 experiences of SARs deployments in hospitals, elderly care centers, occupational health centers, private homes, and educational institutions worldwide from 33 different countries, and involving 52 different robot models. We retrieved, analyzed, and classified the functions that SARs develop in these experiences, the areas in which they are deployed, the principal manufacturers, and the robot models that are being adopted. The functions we identified for SARs are entertainment, companionship, telepresence, edutainment, providing general and personalized information or advice, monitoring, promotion of physical exercise and rehabilitation, testing and pre-diagnosis, delivering supplies, patient registration, giving location indications, patient simulator, protective measure enforcement, medication and well-being adherence, translating and having conversations in multiple languages, psychological therapy, patrolling, interacting with digital devices, and disinfection. Our work provides an in-depth picture of the current state of the art of SARs' deployment in real scenarios for healthcare-related applications and contributes to understanding better the role of these machines in the healthcare sector.

Sooyeon Jeong, Sharifa Alghowinem, Laura Aymerich-Franch et al.

A significant number of college students suffer from mental health issues that impact their physical, social, and occupational outcomes. Various scalable technologies have been proposed in order to mitigate the negative impact of mental health disorders. However, the evaluation for these technologies, if done at all, often reports mixed results on improving users' mental health. We need to better understand the factors that align a user's attributes and needs with technology-based interventions for positive outcomes. In psychotherapy theory, therapeutic alliance and rapport between a therapist and a client is regarded as the basis for therapeutic success. In prior works, social robots have shown the potential to build rapport and a working alliance with users in various settings. In this work, we explore the use of a social robot coach to deliver positive psychology interventions to college students living in on-campus dormitories. We recruited 35 college students to participate in our study and deployed a social robot coach in their room. The robot delivered daily positive psychology sessions among other useful skills like delivering the weather forecast, scheduling reminders, etc. We found a statistically significant improvement in participants' psychological wellbeing, mood, and readiness to change behavior for improved wellbeing after they completed the study. Furthermore, students' personality traits were found to have a significant association with intervention efficacy. Analysis of the post-study interview revealed students' appreciation of the robot's companionship and their concerns for privacy.

Laura Aymerich-Franch, Iliana Ferrer

We examine the implementation of social robots in real-world settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we analyze the areas in which social robots are being adopted, the roles and tasks being fulfilled, and the robot models being implemented. For this, we traced back and analyzed 240 deployment cases with 86 different social robots worldwide that have been adopted since the coronavirus outbreak. We found that social robot adoption during this period was strongly related to the use of this technology for crisis management. The social robots' capacity to perform the roles of liaison to minimize direct contact among humans, safeguard to ensure contagion risk-free environments, and well-being coach to protect mental and physical health, is key to explaining adoption within this context. The results of the study offer a complete overview of social robots' utilization in real life settings during the pandemic.