Shruti Chandra

University of Northern British Columbia · Department of Computer Science

Social robots have great potential in supporting individuals' physical and mental health/wellbeing. While they have been increasingly evaluated in some domains, such as with children with autism, their evaluation has not been as extensive in other areas. We present a systematic review of domains in which social robots have been evaluated specifical...

This paper presents a preliminary design and development of a novel wristband connected to a mobile application to enhance social interaction among children aged 7-12 years who struggle with expressing themselves in group settings. Targeting pedagogical environments, the wristband can facilitate structured group discussions by allowing teachers to...

Maldaimonic game experiences occur when people engage in personally fulfilling play through egocentric, destructive, and/or exploitative acts. Initial qualitative work verified this orientation and experiential construct for English-speaking Westerners. In this comparative mixed methods study, we explored whether and how maldaimonic game experience...

Social robots have great potential to support individuals’ health and wellbeing. We did a follow up study based on previous work of a 2021 systematic review following PRISMA guidelines that identified 443 research articles evaluating social robots in health/wellbeing contexts with adult participants. In this paper we performed a new analysis that s...

Critical scholarship has elevated the problem of gender bias in data sets used to train virtual assistants (VAs). Most work has focused on explicit biases in language, especially against women, girls, femme-identifying people, and genderqueer folk; implicit associations through word embeddings; and limited models of gender and masculinities, especi...

Critical scholarship has elevated the problem of gender bias in data sets used to train virtual assistants (VAs). Most work has focused on explicit biases in language, especially against women, girls, femme-identifying people, and genderqueer folk; implicit associations through word embeddings; and limited models of gender and masculinities, especi...

Diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) are critical factors that need to be considered when developing AI and robotic technologies for people. The lack of such considerations exacerbates and can also perpetuate existing forms of discrimination and biases in society for years to come. Although concerns have already been voiced around the globe, th...

Critical voices within and beyond the scientific community have pointed to a grave matter of concern regarding who is included in research and who is not. Subsequent investigations have revealed an extensive form of sampling bias across a broad range of disciplines that conduct human subjects research called “WEIRD”: Western, Educated, Industrial,...

This research aims to explore the feasibility of integrating social robots as a tool for speech-language pathologists in stuttering intervention. This research followed an exploratory, human-centred approach leveraging the Double Diamond Design Process Model. In this study, we employed co-design tools, including a survey, one-to-one semi-structured...

Learning is more challenging for students with learning disabilities. They often require supplementary learning support such as one-to-one instruction to address academic skill gaps. In this research, we explore the impact of using assistive technology- a social robot, as an educational tool for instructors to support students with learning disabil...

The inclusion of technologies such as telepractice, and virtual reality in the field of communication disorders has transformed the approach to providing healthcare. This research article proposes the employment of similar advanced technology – social robots, by providing a context and scenarios for potential implementation of social robots as supp...

This comprehensive survey and review presents stuttering treatment approaches that have been reported in the past 20 years in order to highlight the different characteristics in each intervention. The comprehensive survey presented in this article was conducted according to the PRISMA guidelines to extract articles on stuttering interventions, publ...

We invite contributions for a Special Issue on Intricacies of Child–Robot Interaction, to be published by the journal Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. Deadline for submission is September 1, 2021.

As robots are entering into educational fields to enhance children’s learning, it becomes relevant to explore different methods of learning in the area of child–robot interaction. In this article, we present an autonomous educational system incorporating a social robot to enhance children’s handwriting skills. The system provides a one-to-one learn...

This paper explores how robotic teammates can enhance and promote cooperation in collaborative settings. It presents a user study in which participants engaged with two fully autonomous robotic partners to play a game together, named “For The Record”, a variation of a public goods game. The game is played for a total of five rounds and in each of t...

Social robots are being used to create better educational scenarios, thereby fostering children»s learning. In the work presented here, we describe an autonomous social robot that was designed to enhance children»s handwriting skills. Exploiting the benefits of the learning-by-teaching method, the system provides a scenario in which a child acts as...

In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of handwriting errors exhibited by children as a way to build adequate strategies for integration with a co-writing peer. The exploration includes the collection of letters written by children in an initial study, which were then revised in a second study. The second study also analyses the "peer-learning" (PL)...

The focus of the research described in this paper is to explore children's perception of a social robot's learning abilities and behavior in an educational context. With this purpose, we conducted a long-term study with children in a school by adopting the learning-by-teaching learning method. The scenario involves a " learner-agent " (a robot) whi...

Social robots are being used to create better educational scenarios, boosting children's motivation and engagement. The focus of the research is to explore new ways to support children in acquisition of their handwriting skills with the help of a social robot. With this perspective, three studies are discussed to investigate aspects related to the...

Research in education has long established how children mutually influence and support each other's learning trajectories, eventually leading to the development and widespread use of learning methods based on peer activities. In order to explore children's learning behavior in the presence of a robotic facilitator during a collaborative writing act...

In order to explore the impact of integrating a robot as a facilitator in a collaborative activity, we examined interpersonal distancing of children both with a human adult and a robot facilitator. Our scenario involves two children performing a collaborative learning activity, which included the writing of a word/letter on a tactile tablet. Based...

Push recovery is an important technology needs to be developed for the effective use of bipedal humanoid robot in the household applications. In this paper, a three mass inverted pendulum model equivalent to Humanoid Open Architecture Platform (HOAP -2) has been developed and the effectiveness of the model has been demonstrated using a software fra...