The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jeong, Sooyeon
Other Authors: Cynthia Breazeal.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2017
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112538
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author Jeong, Sooyeon
author2 Cynthia Breazeal.
author_facet Cynthia Breazeal.
Jeong, Sooyeon
author_sort Jeong, Sooyeon
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description Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1125382019-04-11T04:26:27Z The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context Jeong, Sooyeon Cynthia Breazeal. Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Program in Media Arts and Sciences () Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Page 82 blank. Includes bibliographical references (pages 76-81). In this thesis, I explore how interactive technologies can positively impact human wellness and flourishing. I investigate this in the context of pediatric inpatient care. Children and their parents may undergo challenging experiences when admitted for inpatient care at pediatric hospitals. While most hospitals make efforts to provide socio-emotional support for patients and their families during care, gaps still exist between human resource supply and demand. The Huggable project aims to close this gap by creating a social robot able to mitigate stress and anxiety and to promote positive affect and physical activity in pediatric patients by engaging them in playful interactive activities. We ran a randomized controlled trial study at a local pediatric hospital to study how three different interactive mediums (a plush teddy bear, a virtual agent on a screen and a social robot) affects the child patient's physical activity, affect, joyful play, stress and anxiety. In this thesis, I analyze the social, emotional, linguistic and physical behaviors of the patients, caretakers and medical staff with the video data collected during the Huggable study. Results from the behavioral analyses show that a social robot promotes more physical movement, more emotional verbal expressions, and more dynamic patient-caretaker-medical staff interaction than the virtual character and the plush interventions. Then, I extend the findings from the in-hospital experiment and develop an autonomous virtual avatar mobile application that provides personalized positive psychology interventions. A three-week longitudinal study with smartphone users showed that the interactive virtual avatar resulted an immediate improvement on people's affect and the users' engagement with the avatar increased over time due to the personalization algorithm implemented in the system. The findings from the randomized clinical trial in the pediatric hospital and the longitudinal study with smartphone users suggest the potential benefit of an autonomous and personalized social robot in pediatric inpatient-care contexts on young patients' social and emotional wellbeing. by Sooyeon Jeong. S.M. 2017-12-05T19:17:21Z 2017-12-05T19:17:21Z 2017 2017 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112538 1012943866 eng MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 82 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Program in Media Arts and Sciences ()
Jeong, Sooyeon
The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context
title The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context
title_full The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context
title_fullStr The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context
title_full_unstemmed The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context
title_short The impact of social robots on young patients' socio-emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context
title_sort impact of social robots on young patients socio emotional wellbeing in a pediatric inpatient care context
topic Program in Media Arts and Sciences ()
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112538
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