Social Robot's Processing of Context-Sensitive Emotions in Child Care: A Dutch Use Case

Abstract

Therapists, psychologists, family counselors and coaches in youth care show a clear need for social technology support, e.g. for education, motivation and guidance of the children. For example, the Dutch Child and Family Center explores the possibilities of social robot assistance in their regular care pathways. This robot should address the affective processes in the communication appropriately. Whereas there is an enormous amount of emotion research in human-robot interaction, there is not yet a proven set of models and methods that can be put into this practice directly. Our research aims at a model for robot's emotional recognition and expression that is effective in the Dutch youth care. Consequently, it has to take account of personal differences (e.g., child's developmental phase and mental problems) and the context (e.g., family circumstances and therapy approach). Our study distinguishes different phases that may partially run in parallel. First, possible solutions for affective computing by social robots are identified to set the general design space and understand the constraints. Second, in an exploration phase, focus group sessions are conducted to identify core features of emotional expressions that the robot should or could process, including the context-dependencies. Third, in the testing phase, via scenario-based design and child-robot interaction experiments a practical model of affect processing by a social robot in youth care is derived. This short paper provides an overview of the general approach of this research and some preliminary results of the design space and focus group.