Abstract
Coping with stress is crucial for a healthy lifestyle. In the past, a great deal of research has been conducted to use socially assistive robots as a therapy to alleviate stress and anxiety related problems. However, building a fully autonomous social robot which can deliver psycho-therapeutic solutions is a very challenging endeavor due to limitations in artificial intelligence (AI). To overcome AI’s limitations, researchers have previously introduced crowdsourcing-based teleoperation methods, which summon the crowd’s input to control a robot’s functions. However, in the context of robotics, such methods have only been used to support the object manipulation, navigational, and training tasks. It is not yet known how to leverage real-time crowdsourcing (RTC) to process complex therapeutic conversational tasks for social robotics. To fill this gap, we developed Crowd of Oz (CoZ), an open-source system that allows Softbank’s Pepper robot to support such conversational tasks. To demonstrate the potential implications of this crowd-powered approach, we investigated how effectively, crowd workers recruited in real-time can teleoperate the robot’s speech, in situations when the robot needs to act as a life coach. We systematically varied the number of workers who simultaneously handle the speech of the robot (N = 1, 2, 4, 8) and investigated the concomitant effects for enabling RTC for social robotics. Additionally, we present Pavilion, a novel and open-source algorithm for managing the workers’ queue so that a required number of workers are engaged or waiting. Based on our findings, we discuss salient parameters that such crowd-powered systems must adhere to, so as to enhance their performance in response latency and dialogue quality.
Highlights
Psychological stress is an extent to which persons observe that their demands exceed their ability to manage
Crowd of Oz (CoZ) broadcasts a live audio–video (AV) stream of an interlocutor, to anonymous workers online who can communicate with a stressed person through the embodied conversational agent in real time. In this version of CoZ, we only focused on controlling the speech of the robot and gestures were controlled by Pepper’s built-in animated speech API, which automatically produces appropriate gestures based on the text input
(c) Structuring the dialogue: Cross-checking the responses generated by the crowd, we found that workers in the four- and eight- workers conditions said ‘hello’ in the middle of a conversation which resulted in re-starting the conversation
Summary
Psychological stress is an extent to which persons observe that their demands exceed their ability to manage. Coping with stress is crucial for a healthy lifestyle. Prolonged and high level of stress in humans can affect several physiological and psychological functions including change in heart rate and heart rate variability, muscle tension in the neck, hormonal changes [1] and cause negative feelings. Stress can affect memory processes [2] and can impact the ability to learn and remember [2]. University students are more susceptible to develop stress and anxiety related problems due to highly technical and emotional demands of their studies. The most common stressors that could persuade mental illness and emotional distress include but are not limited to Sensors 2020, 20, 569; doi:10.3390/s20020569 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors
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