Project Aim:

The Robotised Assessment of Children's Mental Wellbeing Project aims to:

1. investigate the open challenges and potential knowledge gaps in the evaluation of mental wellbeing in children;
2. investigate the assessment of factors affecting mental wellbeing in children;
3. investigate the challenges in cHRI studies about mental wellbeing.

Studies Conducted:

A summary of studies with human participants (as of June 2023):

1. Measuring Mental Wellbeing of Children via Human-Robot Interaction: Challenges and Opportunities [Apollo 2022]
2. Can Robots Help in the Evaluation of Mental Wellbeing in Children? An Empirical Study [IEEE RO-MAN 2022]
3. Computational Audio Modelling for Robot-Assisted Assessment of Children’s Mental Wellbeing [ICSR 2022]

Major Findings:

Major findings (as of June 2023):

• - Findings from this work (10 screened papers in total) investigate the challenges in cHRI studies about mental wellbeing by categorising the current research in terms of robot-related factors (robot autonomy and type of robot), protocol-related factors (experiment purpose, tasks, participants and user sensing) and data related factors (analysis and findings)
• - Our results show that the robotised evaluation seems to be the most suitable mode in identifying wellbeing related anomalies in children across the three clusters of participants as compared with the self-report and the parent-report modes. Further, children with decreasing levels of wellbeing (lower, medium and higher tertiles) exhibit different response patterns: children of higher tertile are more negative in their responses to the robot while the ones of lower tertile are more positive in their responses to the robot
• - Our experimental results show that: (i) speech features are reliable for assessing children’s mental wellbeing, but they may not be sufficient on their own, and (ii) verbal information, specifically the sentiment that a picture elicited in children, may impact the children’s responses

Project Team:

• - Prof Hatice Gunes (PI, Apr 2019-present)
• - Dr Micol Spitale (Postdoctoral RA, Nov 2021-present)
• - Nida Abbasi (PhD student working on Robot Assisted Mental Wellbeing Assessment in Children)