Researchers at the University of Cambridge have used a humanoid called Nao to assess the mental well-being of young people. The absence of human interlocutors encourages children to talk more sincerely, even about difficult and sensitive subjects.
Children of the future will probably have very special interlocutors to help assess their well-being: socially assistive robots (SARs). By entering into a relationship with these machines, young people find themselves in a world that is already familiar and very 'physical' to them, so they can express any unease (and emotions in general) in ways that don’t always emerge in relationships with people, whether parents, doctors or psychologists.
The usefulness of robots and, specifically, of a humanoid called Nao, which is about 60 centimetres tall, was tested by a group of experts from Cambridge University (UK), researchers from the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory of the Department of Computer Science and Technology, who presented results of a study of 28 children aged between 9 and 13 at the recent IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication, organised in Naples (Italy).
This is the first time, the experts explained, that robots have been used to assess children’s mental well-being of children.
Children took part in several individual sessions, each lasting 45 minutes, during which Nao asked four types of questions: an open-ended set of questions about the positive or negative feelings they had experienced the previous week, a Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire, a test based on reactions to photographs (the Children's Apperception Test), and the Revised Children's Anxiety and Depression Scale, another set of questions to assess anxiety, depression and panic.
Mental health through easier interaction
Children could respond by talking, but also by touching certain parts of Nao which had sensors, e.g. the hands and feet. Other sensors were placed on the children themselves to measure heart rate, eye and head movements and other stress indicators.
Overall, children reported that they enjoyed interacting with the robot, and gave more complete, intimate and truthful information than they did with human interviewers, probably because they perceived Nao as completely inoffensive, as opposed to when the interviewer is a human.
“Children see the robot as a confidant,” stresses researcher Nida Itrat Abbasi, 'and they feel like they are not getting into trouble for sharing secrets with it. Other researchers have found that children are more likely to offer private information – like the fact that they’re being bullied, for example - to a robot than they would to an adult”.
The study by the UK researchers also revealed a sort of polarisation of responses: i.e. the children who were not experiencing unease gave more positive responses on average than in the control sessions, whereas those who were in a difficult situation had stronger reactions than the controls, probably because they were better able to express negative feelings.
Helpers, not substitutes
Experts stress that these robots are not meant to replace the child's relationship with a therapist, or relatives. However, machines can help offer a more complete picture of the situation, and supplement information.
A tool of this kind - experts commented - could be extremely useful post-pandemic, in which the harm caused by isolation, distance learning, and in general the restrictions on socialising for children and young people due to anti-Covid measures are increasingly emerging.
There has been a significant increase in anxiety, depression, addiction and even suicide worldwide and to counteract this effectively, even innovative tools like SARS, already used as mental health coaches for adults and the elderly, could be useful.
The next stages of the experiment involve studying larger and more diverse samples of children and testing the robots as interlocutors also via video chat (and not physically present).
