Assessing pediatrics patients’ psychological states from biomedical signals in a cloud of social robots

Abstract

This paper describes an on-going research aiming to design and deploy a robotic-pet based intervention integrated to the Child Life program in a paediatric hospital. The purpose is to provide in the personalized health-care network a supplement of smart company to alleviate feelings of anxiety, loneliness and stress of long-term inpatient and their bystanders. The state of the art on companion robots for health related purposes in the long run, ethical concerns in the context of paediatric care and social and technological issues are addressed. A description of the first implementation phases, findings, lessons learned and future work are discussed under a critical multidisciplinary approach confronting perspectives from social science and technology studies, engineering, psychology and nursery. The overall research questions addressed are: can a cloud of social assistive robotic-pets join the network of well-being supply in a paediatric hospital? Under which technical and social conditions this innovation could be appropriate by the organization and -more importantly- could improve the service?