RoboTherapist

The RoboTherapist is an interdisciplinary project focused on researching and developing innovative robotic applications for child-robot interaction (cHRI) to facilitate adaptive health-related coping and improve the quality of life outcomes in pediatric settings. Interactive stimulation robots, a subset of robots designed for social, educational, rehabilitation, therapeutic, and entertainment purposes, offer potential benefits across various practical domains such as communication, learning, entertainment, rehabilitation, therapy, and behavior change. The application of robotics to therapeutic interventions, commonly referred to as robotherapy, represents a promising and groundbreaking approach to promoting health, adjustment, and development in children. This is particularly significant given children's increasing enthusiasm for technology and their openness to interactions with robots. To achieve the intended therapeutic goals and design effective cHRI applications, the RoboTherapist project faces multiple research challenges, with a primary focus on ensuring sustained engagement between the child and the robot.The project aims to contribute to cHRI by proposing applications that incorporate unobtrusive sensing, deep-learning-based automatic perception of child engagement in the robot task, and the application of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. These methods enable the robot to proactively and adaptively engage and interact with children. Ultimately, the RoboTherapist project seeks to advance the field of cHRI by addressing these challenges and designing applications that enhance the well-being of children through effective therapeutic interactions with robots.