“Help me help you” - Social robot-supported health management for children with chronic conditions

About the Project:

This project is focused on the design, development and evaluation of social robots for children with long and life-long conditions such as allergies or asthma. It is funded through the Margarete von Wrangell-Program by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and Art (MWK). 
Social robots can assist in child healthcare and therapy settings in a number of ways. They have been used for health behavior change in obesity prevention [1], in autism therapy [2], or to improve well-being in hospitalized children [3], yielding impressive positive outcomes. Regarding chronic conditions, studies have shown that social robots can support self-management of children with diabetes [4]. Few studies have, however, investigated the use of social robots for children with allergies or asthma, which are two of the most prevalent chronic conditions among children in Germany [5]. 
To this end, we investigate how findings from other settings can be transferred to develop a social robot that can help children learn to self-manage their chronic conditions. In educational contexts, children often learn the most when viewing a robot as their peer [6]. Children may therefore also learn best to manage a chronic condition when they learn to deal with their illness together with the robot as a peer, following the paradigm of learning-by- teaching: Both the child and the robot have the same, e.g., allergy, and the child teaches the robot to manage its allergies, thereby learning to manage it also. 

References

[1] Andreas Triantafyllidis, Anastasios Alexiadis, Dimosthenis Elmas, Georgios Gerovasilis, Konstantinos Votis, and Dimitrios Tzovaras. A social robot-based platform for health behavior change toward prevention of childhood obesity. Universal access in the infor- mation society, 22(4):1405–1415, 2023.
[2] Nazerke Rakhymbayeva, Aida Amirova, and Anara Sandygulova. A long-term engage- ment with a social robot for autism therapy. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 8:669972, 2021.
[3] Clara J Moerman and Rianne ML Jansens. Using social robot pleo to enhance the well-being of hospitalised children. Journal of Child Health Care, 25(3):412–426, 2021.
[4] Tareq Alhmiedat and Mohammed Alotaibi. Employing social robots for managing diabetes among children: Sara. Wireless Personal Communications, 130(1):449–468, 2023.
[5] Karl-Christian Bergmann, Joachim Heinrich, and Hildegard Niemann. Current status of allergy prevalence in Germany: Position paper of the environmental medicine commission of the Robert Koch Institute. Allergo Journal International, 25:6–10, 2016.
[6] Huili Chen, Hae Won Park, and Cynthia Breazeal. Teaching and learning with children: Impact of reciprocal peer learning with a social robot on children’s learning and emotive engagement. Computers & Education, 150:103836, 2020.

Contact Person

Caterina Neef

Funding and Sponsors

Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and Art (MWK)