A young boy with type 1 Diabetes Mellitus is supported by a social robot on the road to self-management. The robot has knowledge on the goals that the boy needs to reach, as discussed with his health care professional. The robot also knows the boy’s activity options and preferences. It suggests activities based on this knowledge, but also encourages the boy to try new approaches. For parents, such a social robot means that they can be less teacher and more parent and for the health care professionals it means they can focus on the emotional aspects instead of the knowledge aspects during visits. Finally, the boy sees the robot as something that is fun and a peer in contrast to someone/something with a higher authority. The robot supports relatedness and a feeling of competence, the different activities provide a feeling of autonomy, and less budding of the parents reduces stress for the whole family. This all supports that the boy sees diabetesas his own responsibility and feels that he has enough competence and autonomy to take care of diabetes himself. In support of this vision we look in this thesis at the design and evaluation of a social robot.@en

We are developing a social robot that helps children with diabetes Type 1 to acquire self-management skills and routines. There is a diversity of Behavior Change Techniques (BCTs) and guidelines that seem to be useful for the development of such support, but it is not yet clear how to work out the techniques into concrete robot support functions and behaviors. The situated Cognitive Engineering (sCE) methodology provides guidance for the design and evaluation of such functions and behaviors, but doesn’t provide a univocal specification method of the theoretical and empirical justification. This paper presents an extension of sCE: a formal template that describes the relations between support objectives, behavior change theory, design specifications and evaluation outcomes, called situated Design Rationale (sDR) and the method to get this. As test case, the European ALIZ-e project is used to instantiate this design rationale and to evaluate the usage. This case study showed that sDR provides concrete guidance (1) to derive robot functions and behaviors from the theory and (2) to designate the corresponding effects with evaluation instruments. Furthermore, it helps to establish an effective, incremental and iterative, design and evaluation process, by relating positive and negative evaluation outcomes to robot behaviors at the task and communication level. The proposed solution for explicating the design rationale makes it possible for others to understand the decisions made and thereby supports replicating experiments or reusing parts of the design rationale.@en

Objective To assess the effects of a personal robot, providing diabetes self-management education in a clinical setting on the pleasure, engagement and motivation to play a diabetes quiz of children (7–12) with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), and on their acquisition of knowledge about their illness. Methods Children with T1DM (N = 27) participated in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which they played a diabetes mellitus self-management education (DMSE) game, namely a diabetes quiz, with a personal or neutral robot on three occasions at the clinic, or were allocated to a control group (care as usual). Personalised robot behaviour was based on the self-determination theory (SDT), focusing on the children's needs for competence, relatedness and autonomy. The SDT determinants pleasure, motivation and diabetes knowledge were measured. Child-robot interaction was observed, including level of engagement. Results Results showed an increase in diabetes knowledge in children allocated to the robot groups and not in those allocated to the control group (P =.001). After three sessions, children working with the personal robot scored higher for determinants of SDT than children with the neutral robot (P = .02). They also found the robot to be more pleasurable (P =.04), they answered more quiz questions correctly (P =.02), and were more motivated to play a fourth time (P = .03). The analysis of audio/video recordings showed that in regard to engagement, children with the personal robot were more attentive to the robot, more social, and more positive (P < .05). Conclusion The study showed how a personal robot that plays DMSE games and applies STD based strategies (i.e., provides constructive feedback, acknowledges feelings and moods, encourages competition and builds a rapport) can help to improve health literacy in children in an pleasurable, engaging and motivating way. Using a robot in health care could contribute to self-management in children with a chronic disease and help them to cope with their illness.

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Kinderen kennen eigen belevingen, waarden en behoeften wanneer het gaat om technologische ondersteuning, zoals eHealth. Dit onderstreept het belang kinderen nadrukkelijk te betrekken in onderzoek en ontwikkeling van technologische vernieuwingen. Dit wordt echter als uitdagend ervaren. Conventionele methodes als vragenlijsten schieten te kort. Dit artikel beschrijft een co-designpakket van creatieve methodes dat wordt ingezet om belangrijke dagelijkse ervaringen, waarden en behoeften te verzamelen bij kinderen (7-14 jaar) met type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM), ontwerpeisen op te stellen en gebruikersevaluatie te verrichten.@en

Conversation Fillers (CFs), such as ‘um’, ‘hmm’, and ‘ah’, may help to improve the human-robot interaction by smoothening the robot’s responses. This paper presents the design and test of such CFs – alongside iconic pensive or acknowledging gestures – for Wizard of Oz (WoZ) controlled open-ended dialogues in child-robot interactions. A controlled experiment with 26 children showed that these CFs can improve the perceived speediness, aliveness, humanness, and likability of the robot, without decreasing perceptions of intelligence,
trustworthiness, or autonomy.@en

Expressive behaviour is a vital aspect of human interaction. A model for adaptive emotion expression was developed for the Nao robot. The robot has an internal arousal and valence value, which are influenced by the emotional state of its interaction partner and emotional occurrences such as winning a game. It expresses these emotions through its voice, posture, whole body poses, eye colour and gestures. An experiment with 18 children (mean age 9) and two Nao robots was conducted to study the influence of adaptive emotion expression on the interaction behaviour and opinions of children. In a within-subjects design the children played a quiz with both an affective robot using the model for adaptive emotion expression and a non-affective robot without this model. The affective robot reacted to the emotions of the child using the implementation of the model, the emotions of the child were interpreted by a Wizard of Oz. The dependent variables, namely the behaviour and opinions of the children, were measured through video analysis and questionnaires. The results show that children react more expressively and more positively to a robot which adaptively expresses itself than to a robot which does not. The feedback of the children in the questionnaires further suggests that showing emotion through movement is considered a very positive trait for a robot. From their positive reactions we can conclude that children enjoy interacting with a robot which adaptively expresses itself through emotion and gesture more than with a robot which does not do this.@en