For social robots to maintain long-term engagement as exercise instructors, rapport-building is essential. Motor mimicry—imitating one’s physical actions—during social interaction has long been recognized as a powerful tool for fostering rapport, and it is widely used in rehabilitation exercises where patients mirror a physiotherapist or video demonstration. We developed a novel Brain-Robot Interface (BRI) that allows a social robot instructor to mimic a patient’s exercise movements in real-time, using mental commands derived from the patient’s intention. The system was evaluated in an exploratory study with 14 participants (3 physiotherapists and 11 hemiparetic patients recovering from stroke or other injuries). We found our system successfully demonstrated exercise mimicry in 12 sessions, however, accuracy varied. Participants had positive perceptions of the robot instructor, with high trust and acceptance levels, which were not affected by the introduction of BRI technology.

Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) are highly prevalent and, if left untreated, can lead to serious health complications. While urine testing is an effective diagnostic tool, it is often conducted late in the infection’s progression. As part of a broader project exploring technology-driven approaches to early UTI detection, we introduce an assistive robot prototype designed to facilitate daily interactions with users. This robot gathers a range of information that may serve as potential early indicators of UTIs, through a three-tiered interaction framework, increasing in intensity from light conversational topics to structured clinical questionnaires. To assess the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach, we conduct a user study in a psueudo-home environment involving 15 individuals with a history of UTIs, spanning 55 interactive sessions. Findings reveal promising levels of engagement and acceptance and insight on our LLM-driven interaction as a feasible approach. We provide key next steps for improvement towards our long-term study in-situ, highlighting the need for a more robust conversational strategy and promoting agency through user-initiated interactions.

Motivating older adults to engage in cognitive activities has the potential to slow cognitive decline. This article presents a participatory design (PD) workshop and follow-up prototype evaluation to determine how cognitive training activities can be adapted to integrate socially assistive robots and sensory feedback (visual, auditory, and haptic, specifically). The workshop with older adults and therapists resulted in concrete designs and strategies for engagement. The second phase of this work was to implement these outcomes into a prototype that incorporated a humanoid robot and sensory feedback, with a particular focus on haptic feedback. The evaluation with eight older adults supported the potential of hand tracking with sensory feedback as an interaction mechanism to foster engagement, where the increased workload notably led to high levels of engagement. The prototype results confirmed the strategies and designs from the PD workshop were effective as a way of engaging older adults in cognitive activities. This article highlights the potential for the unique combination of socially assistive robots and sensory feedback to promote older adults’ engagement in cognitive activities.

Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) have the potential to lead to severe health implications if not detected and treated promptly. The Feather project aims to develop a system which will provide early identification of UTIs through regular interactions with an individual at home. This paper utilizes a participatory design workshop to investigate the use of Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) for this purpose, and understand 1) the appropriate robot embodiment, and 2) the relevant social interactions to identify UTI indicators. Two of the five explored embodiments were found to facilitate a suitable balance between agency and autonomy for this task, with the telepresence robot creating a preference due to a need for strong navigation capabilities. Participants further devised a series of multimodal interactions to identify a range of UTI indicators. These early investigatory design insights lay the groundwork for introducing SARs to this novel area of application, from which we plan to build upon to develop a working system.

Cognitive training is effective at retaining cognitive function and delaying decline for typically ageing older adults, individuals with mild cognitive impairment, and persons with dementia. Technological resources can address limiting factors that inhibit engagement and access to this treatment. We investigated how a socially assistive robot-facilitated memory task with sensory feedback was received by older adults. The impact of unimodal and multimodal administration of auditory and haptic feedback using two robot embodiments (Pepper and Nao) was evaluated in terms of user performance, usability, and workload. In contrast to sensory feedback research, auditory feedback resulted in significantly higher task accuracy. This was, however, supported by previous work from neurological literature. Auditory feedback also received significantly higher usability, and this preference was validated by qualitative feedback from participants. Regardless of robotic embodiment, this study demonstrates an advantage for auditory feedback (over haptic and multimodal) in cognitive training activities for older adults.