Rethinking Privacy in the Age of Social Robots

In the introduction of this thesis, I contend that robot ethics, as a research field, generally treats privacy as the appropriate distribution of information, and therefore overlooks privacy concerns raised by robots beyond this conceptualization’s purview. I illustrate this contention by evaluating a hypothetical case involving a household...

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. The first are five...

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...

Memory-Based Personalization for Fostering a Long-Term Child-Robot Relationship

After the novelty effect wears off children need a new motivator to keep interacting with a social robot. Enabling children to build a relationship with the robot is the key for facilitating a sustainable long-term interaction. We designed a memory-based personalization strategy that safeguards the continuity between sessions and tailors the...

Understanding Design Preferences for Robots for Pain Management: A Co-Design Study

There is growing interest in psychological interventions using socially assistive robots to mitigate distress and pain in the pediatric population. This work seeks to address the deficit in understanding of what features and functionality young children and their parents desire to help with pain management by using co-design, a common...

Affective Body Language of Humanoid Robots: Perception and Effects in Human Robot Interaction

Mood contagion of robot body language in human robot interaction

The aim of our work is to design bodily mood expressions of humanoid robots for interactive settings that can be recognized by users and have (positive) effects on people who interact with the robots. To this end, we develop a parameterized behavior model for humanoid robots to express mood through body language. Different settings of the...

Designing Robot Embodiments for Social Interaction: Affordances Topple Realism and Aesthetics

In the near future, human-like social robots will become indispensable for providing support in various social tasks, in particular for healthcare (e.g., assistance, coaching). The perception of realism, in particular human-like features, can help facilitate mediated social interaction. The current study investigated the effects of form realism...

Robot Mood is Contagious: Effects of Robot Body Language in the Imitation Game

Mood contagion is an automatic mechanism that induces a congruent mood state by means of the observation of another person's emotional expression. In this paper, we address the question whether robot mood displayed during an imitation game can (a) be recognized by participants and (b) produce contagion effects. Robot mood was displayed by...