Rebecca Hutchinson’s research while affiliated with University of Waterloo and other places

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 specifically in health/wellbeing contexts. We ask which robots have been evaluated, who the participants were, and how participants interacted with the robots. PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews were followed. Articles with children as participants, using a purely robotic device, and in languages other than English were excluded. 9362 peer-reviewed articles (up to February 2021) from ACM DL, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, PubMed, and PsychInfo were identified. After applying the inclusion/exclusion criteria 443 articles were included in the review. The majority of studies were conducted at care centres while studies in hospitals/clinics have seen relatively limited attention. In many cases, the social robots were not programmed for specific health-related tasks, limiting their application. We also discuss robots used in real-world settings and propose a “Personal healthcare journey”, which includes different stages of one's life which could benefit from a social robot, with the goal of increasing long term adoption of social robots for supporting health/wellbeing.

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 showed that while the vast majority of the articles reported positive outcomes related to the use of social robots in these contexts, only half of those articles supported the results by statistical tests and comparisons, highlighting a need for future studies with robust methodologies that can further study and inform the use of social robots for supporting adults in health/wellbeing. We discuss that different qualitative and quantitative methodologies are equally valuable, as long as the conclusions are based on the data collected. We also encourage publication of studies with well designed and executed methodologies that lead to neutral or negative outcomes. This is in line with other scientific research fields that emphasize the need to report on such results to avoid needless replication of studies that have already been done and could provide important lessons for the field, but never got published.