Emotional Distraction for Children Anxiety Reduction During Vaccination
This work addresses anxiety reduction in children during medical procedures, but it is incremental as it builds on existing social robot distraction methods.
The study investigated whether a social robot displaying emotional behavior could reduce children's anxiety during vaccination more effectively than a non-emotional robot, finding that emotional distraction led to a significant reduction in parent-reported anxiety levels.
Social assistive robots are starting to be widely used in pediatric health-care environments with the aim of distracting and entertaining children, and so of reducing a possible state of anxiety. In this paper, we present some initial results of a study (N=69) conducted in a Health-Vaccines Center, where the distraction role of a social robot, which interacts with a child showing an emotional behavior, is compared with the same not showing any emotional social cue. Outcome criteria for the evaluation of the intervention included the parents reported level of anxiety before, during and after the procedure.