A preliminary investigation of using humanoid social robots as non-pharmacological techniques with children

This paper presents an observational preliminary study to examine the potentialities of the humanoid social robots as non-pharmacological techniques for children. The aim of the robots is to entertain the patients, interact through voice, gestures and funny animations, in order to decrease their negative feelings, and, at the same time, to promote positive emotions. This study exploited two different humanoid social robots, Pepper and Sanbot Elf, and involved twenty-eight hospitalized patients, age 3-19, assigned randomly to one of them. We analysed the feelings of the patients in terms of several different positive and negative moods, focusing on their variation in three different times: before, during and after the procedure. We found a significant decrease of the negative feelings by a factor between 31.25% and 53.65%, and an increase of positive emotions up to 73.33%. Generally both the robots were appreciated by the most of the children: the 78.57% of the participants evaluated the experience positive and 85.71% declared that would like to play again with the robots, if they had to repeat the procedure.