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Therabot™ is an assistive-robotic therapy system designed to provide support during counseling sessions and home therapy practice to patients diagnosed with conditions associated with trauma. It has the form factor of a floppy-eared dog with coloring similar to that of a beagle, and comfortably fits in a person's lap.
Citations
... Additional padding was sometimes added under the covering and on top of the encased padding to fill in low spots in the covering to shape the robot. The initial prototype, demonstrated at the 2015 HRI conference [18], was fabricated by hand with the primary internal structure composed of two flat wooden platforms held together by a thick rubber strip. Components attached to the internal structure included actuators for each leg, a three degree-of-freedom neck, two degree-offreedom tail, piezoelectric and capacitive touch sensors, an inertial measurement unit, and a microphone. ...
Designing a socially therapeutic assistive robot (STAR) for use in mental healthcare is an emerging interdisciplinary process, for which there is a lack of comprehensive guidance and standards. This paper provides insight into the design and development process of the socially therapeutic assistive robotic dog, Therabot™. By outlining the project's eleven-year history, exploring a snapshot of its current state, and discussing its trajectories we aim to share a useful glimpse into the processes that guide the creation of a STAR.
Today’s teens will most likely be the first generation to spend a lifetime living and interacting with both mechanical and social robots. Although human–robot interaction has been explored in children, adults, and seniors, examination of teen–robot interaction has been limited. In this paper, we provide evidence that teen–robot interaction is a unique area of inquiry and designing for teens is categorically different from other types of human–robot interaction. Using human-centered design, our team is developing a social robot to gather stress and mood data from teens in a public high school. To better understand teen–robot interaction, we conducted an interaction study in the wild to explore and capture teens’ interactions with a low-fidelity social robot prototype. Then, through group interviews we gathered data regarding their perceptions about social robots. Although we anticipated minimal engagement due to the low fidelity of our prototype, teens showed strong engagement and lengthy interactions. Additionally, teens expressed thoughtful articulations of how a social robot could be emotionally supportive. We conclude the paper by discussing future areas for consideration when designing for teen–robot interaction.
Social robots are emerging as an important intervention for a variety of vulnerable populations. However, engaging participants in the design of social robots in a way that is ethical, meaningful, and rigorous can be challenging. Many current methods in human–robotic interaction rely on laboratory practices, often experimental, and many times involving deception which could erode trust in vulnerable populations. Therefore, in this paper, we share our human-centered design methodology informed by a participatory approach, drawing on three years of data from a project aimed to design and develop a social robot to improve the mental health of teens. We present three method cases from the project that describe creative and age appropriate methods to gather contextually valid data from a teen population. Specific techniques include design research, scenario and script writing, prototyping, and teens as operators and collaborative actors. In each case, we describe the method and its implementation and discuss the potential strengths and limitations. We conclude by situating these methods by presenting a set of recommended participatory research principles that may be appropriate for designing new technologies with vulnerable populations.
