Implicit aspects of the psychosocial rehabilitation with a humanoid robot

Dimitrova, Maya; Garate, Virginia Ruiz; Withey, Dan; Harper, Chris

Abstract

The paper presents an approach to understanding the emergent dynamics of human-robot interaction in the specific case of a humanoid robot taking the role of a co-therapist to the human therapist in psychosocial rehabilitation by focusing on the nonverbal communication in these sessions. The intention is to eliminate the negative effects of reactance to the robot by employing the SociBot platform, which has been designed with enhanced facial features. An empirical study is performed to investigate implicit aspects of perceiving faces of different modality. The results show that viewers assess differently the positive and negative features, which could be attributed to the presented faces – human, android or robotic (machine-looking). At the same time, no effect of type of face on the feature assessment process was observed. Some implications for using robots as co-therapists are briefly discussed as an emerging interactive technology in support of people with special needs.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Acceptance Date: May 16, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Aug 29, 2023
• Publication Date: Aug 29, 2023
• Deposit Date: Sep 4, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 30, 2024
• Publisher: Springer Verlag (Germany)
• Pages: 119-128
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems
• Series ISSN: 2367-3370
• Book Title: Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning, Workshops - 13th International Conference
• ISBN: 9783031421334
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42134-1_12
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11074083
• Additional Information: First Online: 29 August 2023; Conference Acronym: MIS4TEL; Conference Name: International Conference in Methodologies and intelligent Systems for Techhnology Enhanced Learning; Conference City: Guimaraes; Conference Country: Portugal; Conference Year: 2023; Conference Start Date: 12 July 2023; Conference End Date: 14 July 2023; Conference ID: mistel2023; Conference URL: https://www.mis4tel-conference.net/