Getting acquainted: First steps for child-robot relationship formation.

In this article we discuss two studies of children getting acquainted with an autonomous socially assistive robot. The success of the first encounter is key for a sustainable long-term supportive relationship. We provide four validated behavior design elements that enable the robot to robustly get acquainted with the child.

Interactive Education on Sleep Hygiene with a Social Robot at a Pediatric Oncology Outpatient Clinic: Feasibility, Experiences, and Preliminary Effectiveness.

Objectives: Children with cancer often experience sleep problems, which are associated with many negative physical and psychological health outcomes, as well as with a lower quality of life. Therefore, interventions are strongly required to improve sleep in this population. We evaluated interactive education with respect to sleep hygiene with a social robot at a pediatric oncology outpatient clinic regarding the feasibility, experiences, and preliminary effectiveness.

Who Wants to Grant Robots Rights?

The robot rights debate has thus far proceeded without any reliable data concerning the public opinion about robots and the rights they should have. We have administered an online survey ( = 439) that investigates layman's attitudes toward granting particular rights to robots. Furthermore, we have asked them the reasons for their willingness to grant them those rights.

Quality of Care Perceived by Older Patients and Caregivers in Integrated Care Pathways With Interviewing Assistance From a Social Robot: Noninferiority Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Society is facing a global shortage of 17 million health care workers, along with increasing health care demands from a growing number of older adults. Social robots are being considered as solutions to part of this problem.

Objective: Our objective is to evaluate the quality of care perceived by patients and caregivers for an integrated care pathway in an outpatient clinic using a social robot for patient-reported outcome measure (PROM) interviews versus the currently used professional interviews.

Robot for health data acquisition among older adults: a pilot randomised controlled cross-over trial.

Background /objectives: Healthcare professionals (HCP) are confronted with an increased demand for assessments of important health status measures, such as patient-reported outcome measurements (PROM), and the time this requires. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness and acceptability of using an HCP robot assistant, and to test the hypothesis that a robot can autonomously acquire PROM data from older adults.

Design: A pilot randomised controlled cross-over study where a social robot and a nurse administered three PROM questionnaires with a total of 52 questions.