Socially assistive robots serving individuals with cancer and deafness/hearing loss

Abstract

Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) may soon be able to play an important role in education and treatment of individuals with special needs based on their interests and needs. In this chapter, we present the specifications and performance of two social robots, designed and fabricated by our research group at Sharif University of Technology-Iran, to serve children with cancer and individuals with deafness/hearing loss: (1) the Arash robot for educational and therapeutic involvement of children with cancer, and (2) the RASA robot to facilitate teaching Iranian Sign Language (ISL) to individuals with hearing disabilities. Moreover, the effect of utilizing a NAO Humanoid Robot as a therapy-assistive tool in dealing with pediatric distress in Iran is presented during a Social Robot Assisted Therapy (SRAT) program. In the cancer studies, the robot-assisted sessions were aimed at instructing the children about their affliction and its symptoms, sympathizing with them, and providing a space for them to express their fears and worries. The results of descriptive statistics and MANOVA indicated that the children's stress, depression, and anger were considerably alleviated during the SRAT treatment. In the deaf studies, we build a robotic architecture able to simultaneously adjust a robot's teaching parameters according to both the user's past and present performance, adapt the content of the training, and then implement it on the RASA robot to teach sign language based on these parameters in a manner similar to a human teacher. Two groups of participants were recruited. For the first group, the robot teaches without the adaptive architecture, while for the second group, the teaching is done with the adaptive architecture. The assessment phase was conducted with 8 users in person and 48 users virtually. A standard UTAUT questionnaire was selected to assess the effectiveness of this methodology by comparing different items from the two groups of users. Statistical analysis of the t-test and Cohen's d effect size found that the second group felt the robot's adaptability significantly more than the first group, indicating that the methodology used in this study was effective and that the robot's ability to adapt was felt by users. Considering the positive reactions from the children to the robot assistant's presence at the intervention sessions, and observing the numerical results, one can anticipate that utilizing a social robot with different communication abilities can be beneficial, both in elevation of efficacy in interventions, and fomenting kids to be more interactive and cooperative in their treatment sessions.