Child-Robot Interaction Studies During COVID-19 Pandemic
This work addresses challenges in social robotics research for children with disabilities during the pandemic, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new constraints.
The paper examines how COVID-19 restrictions impacted child-robot interaction studies, focusing on two cases: using the Pepper robot for audiometry tests with hearing-impaired children and the Kaspar robot for interaction games with children with ASD.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic affected our lives deeply, just like everyone else, the children also suffered from the restrictions due to COVID-19 affecting their education and social interactions with others, being restricted from play areas and schools for a long time. Although social robots provide a promising solution to support children in their education, healthcare and social interaction with others, the precautions due to COVID-19 also introduced new constraints in the social robotics research. In this paper, we will discuss the benefits and challenges encountered in child-robot interaction due to COVID-19 based on two user studies. The first study involves children with hearing disabilities, and Pepper humanoid robot to support their audiometry tests. The second study includes the child-sized humanoid robot Kaspar and interaction games with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).