The Effect of Simple Emotional Gesturing in a Socially Assistive Robot on Child's Engagement at a Group Vaccination Day
Publication date
2023-03-13
Authors
Neerincx, Anouk
Leven, Jessica
Wolfert, Pieter
de Graaf, Maartje
Editors
Advisors
Supervisors
Document Type
Part of book
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taverne
Abstract
Children encounter high levels of stress and anxiety before receiving medical treatment, such as a vaccination. This paper explores the efect of emotional gesturing in socially assistive robots (SARs) on children's observed and self-reported engagement, as well as self-reported anxiety, fear, and trust during a group vaccination. A total of 249 children interacted with the social robot iPal before and after receiving the vaccine. Our results show an overall positive efect of adding emotional gestures to a SAR's interaction behavior leading to increased engagement and lower anxiety, while increased engagement also resulted in trusting the robot more. Thus, adding emotional gestures during child-robot interaction is a powerful way to improve the child's experience during a group vaccination day.
Keywords
child-robot interaction, emotional gestures, feld study, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
Citation
Neerincx, A, Leven, J, Wolfert, P & De Graaf, M M A 2023, The Effect of Simple Emotional Gesturing in a Socially Assistive Robot on Child's Engagement at a Group Vaccination Day. in HRI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 162-171, 18th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, HRI 2023, Stockholm, Sweden, 13/03/23. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568162.3576960, conference