Creating a Robot Coach for Mindfulness and Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Study

Social robots can deliver mindfulness sessions via teleoperation, where a human coach controls the robot's upper body and head movements in real time and sees through its camera. Over five weeks, participants who interacted with the teleoperated robot coach reported positive responses for all sessions, similar to those who interacted with a human coach. However, ratings for the robot coach's motion and conversation changed over time, while human coach ratings remained consistently high. Participants' personality traits, specifically conscientiousness and neuroticism, influenced their perceptions of the robot coach.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Social robots are starting to become incorporated into daily lives by assisting in the promotion of physical and mental wellbeing. This paper investigates the use of social robots for delivering mindfulness sessions. We created a teleoperated robotic platform that enables an experienced human coach to conduct the sessions in a virtual manner by replicating upper body and head pose in real time. The coach is also able to view the world from the robot's perspective and make a conversation with participants by talking and listening through the robot. We studied how participants interacted with a teleoperated robot mindfulness coach over a period of 5 weeks and compared with the interactions another group of participants had with a human coach. The mindfulness sessions delivered by both types of coaching invoked positive responses from the participants for all the sessions. We found that the participants rated the interactions with human coach consistently high in all aspects. However, there is a longitudinal change in the ratings for the interaction with the teleoperated robot for the aspects of motion and conversation. We also found that the participants' personality traits -- conscientiousness and neuroticism influenced the perceptions of the robot coach.