Making the transition to long-term interaction with social-robot systems has been identified as one of the main challenges in human-robot interaction. This article identifies four design principles to address this challenge and applies them in a real-world implementation: cloud-based robot control, a modular design, one common knowledge base for all applications, and hybrid artificial intelligence for decision making and reasoning. The control architecture for this robot includes a common Knowledge-base (ontologies), Data-base, "Hybrid Artificial Brain"(dialogue manager, action selection and explainable AI), Activities Centre (Timeline, Quiz, Break and Sort, Memory, Tip of the Day, ), Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA, i.e., robot and avatar), and Dashboards (for authoring and monitoring the interaction). Further, the ECA is integrated with an expandable set of (mobile) health applications. The resulting system is a Personal Assistant for a healthy Lifestyle (PAL), which supports diabetic children with self-management and educates them on health-related issues (48 children, aged 6-14, recruited via hospitals in the Netherlands and in Italy). It is capable of autonomous interaction "in the wild"for prolonged periods of time without the need for a "Wizard-of-Oz"(up until 6 months online). PAL is an exemplary system that provides personalised, stable and diverse, long-term human-robot interaction. ... Read more

Social or humanoid robots do hardly show up in “the wild,” aiming at pervasive and enduring human benefits such as child health. This paper presents a socio-cognitive engineering (SCE) methodology that guides the ongoing research & development for an evolving, longer-lasting human-robot partnership in practice. The SCE methodology has been applied in a large European project to develop a robotic partner that supports the daily diabetes management processes of children, aged between 7 and 14 years (i.e., Personal Assistant for a healthy Lifestyle, PAL). Four partnership functions were identified and worked out (joint objectives, agreements, experience sharing, and feedback & explanation) together with a common knowledge-base and interaction design for child's prolonged disease self-management. In an iterative refinement process of three cycles, these functions, knowledge base and interactions were built, integrated, tested, refined, and extended so that the PAL robot could more and more act as an effective partner for diabetes management. The SCE methodology helped to integrate into the human-agent/robot system: (a) theories, models, and methods from different scientific disciplines, (b) technologies from different fields, (c) varying diabetes management practices, and (d) last but not least, the diverse individual and context-dependent needs of the patients and caregivers. The resulting robotic partner proved to support the children on the three basic needs of the Self-Determination Theory: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This paper presents the R&D methodology and the human-robot partnership framework for prolonged “blended” care of children with a chronic disease (children could use it up to 6 months; the robot in the hospitals and diabetes camps, and its avatar at home). It represents a new type of human-agent/robot systems with an evolving collective intelligence. The underlying ontology and design rationale can be used as foundation for further developments of long-duration human-robot partnerships “in the wild.” ... Read more

This paper describes ongoing work carried out in the European project PAL which will support childre in their diabetes self-management as well as assist health professionals and parents involved in the diabete regimen of the child. Here, we will focus on the construction of the PAL ontology which has been assemble from several independently developed sub-ontologies and which are brought together by a set of hand-writte interface axioms, expressed in OWL.We will describe in detail how the triple model of RDF has been extende towards transaction time in order to represent time-varying data. Examples of queries and rules involvin temporal information will be presented as well. The approach is currently been in use in diabetes camps. ... Read more

The PAL project1 is developing an embodied conversational agent (robot and its avatar), and applications for child-agent activities that help children from 8 to 14 years old to acquire the required knowledge, skills, and attitude for adequate diabetes selfmanagement. Formal and informal caregivers can use the PAL system to enhance their supportive role for this self-management learning process. We are developing a common ontology (i) to support normative behavior in a flexible way, (ii) to establish mutual understanding in the human-agent system, (iii) to integrate and utilize knowledge from the application and scientific domains, and (iv) to produce sensible human-agent dialogues. The common ontology is constructed by relating and integrating partly existing separate ontologies that are specific to certain contexts or domains. This paper presents the general vision, approach, and state of the art. ... Read more