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When children are anxious or scared, it can be hard for them to stay still or follow instructions during medical procedures, making the process more challenging and affecting procedure results. This is particularly true for radiological…
Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in "care-taking" of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better…
Purpose: Mutual acceptance is required for any human-to-human interaction. Therefore, one would assume that this also holds for robot-patient interactions. However, the medical robotic imaging field lacks research in the area of acceptance.…
We present an ongoing project that aims to develop a social robot to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. Our approach uses automated planning as a core component for action selection in…
This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop a social robot designed to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. While robots have previously been trialled for this task,…
Forensic mental health care involves the treatment of individuals with severe mental disorders who have committed violent offences. These settings are often characterized by high levels of bureaucracy, risk avoidance, and restricted…
Social robots are increasingly being explored as tools to support emotional wellbeing, particularly in non-clinical settings. Drawing on a range of empirical studies and practical deployments, this paper outlines six key insights that…
This paper refers to an observational research that investigates preschool children's mental representations of robots. Our hypotheses were that: a) three to six years-old children think about robots as human-like entities, concerning to…
Computational psychiatry is a field aimed at developing formal models of information processing in the human brain, and how alterations in this processing can lead to clinical phenomena. Despite significant progress in the development of…
The potential use of large language models (LLMs) in healthcare robotics can help address the significant demand put on healthcare systems around the world with respect to an aging demographic and a shortage of healthcare professionals.…
Social assistive robots are starting to be widely used in pediatric health-care environments with the aim of distracting and entertaining children, and so of reducing a possible state of anxiety. In this paper, we present some initial…
Human-robot collaboration (HRC) is an emerging trend of robotics that promotes the co-presence and cooperation of humans and robots in common workspaces. Physical vicinity and interaction between humans and robots, combined with the…
Application of humanoid robots has been common in the field of healthcare and education. It has been recurrently used to improve social behavior and mollify distress level among children with autism, cancer and cerebral palsy. This article…
Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops…
Medical robotics includes assistive devices used by the physician in order to make his/her diagnostic or therapeutic practices easier and more efficient. This chapter focuses on such systems. It introduces the general field of…
This paper reviews the use of socially interactive robots to assist in the therapy of children with autism. The extent to which the robots were successful in helping the children in their social, emotional, and communication deficits was…
The application of the Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in medical clinical scenarios remains underexplored. Previous benchmarks only focus on the capacity of the MLLMs in medical visual question-answering (VQA) or report…
Facial expressiveness plays a crucial role in a robot's ability to engage and interact with children. Prior research has shown that expressive robots can enhance child engagement during human-robot interactions. However, many robots used in…
In spite of the strong performance of machine learning (ML) models in radiology, they have not been widely accepted by radiologists, limiting clinical integration. A key reason is the lack of explainability, which ensures that model…
Socially Assistive Robots are studied in different Child-Robot Interaction settings. However, logistical constraints limit accessibility, particularly affecting timely support for mental wellbeing. In this work, we have investigated whether…