Incorporating guidelines for health assistance into a socially intelligent robot

Abstract

The world population is getting older and more and more people suffer from a chronic disease such as diabetes. The need for medical (self-)care therefore increases, and we think a personal (robot) assistant could help. This paper gives guidelines for self-care that supports and shows how it could be incorporated in a (embodied) personal assistant. These guidelines were derived from motivational interviewing, persuasive technology, and from existing guidelines for personal assistants. Questions this paper addresses include: Is it possible to incorporate them in a personal assistant? Can a robot have the same kind of dialogs as a text interface? A first experiment, conducted with young participants, showed that the guidelines were best expressed in a socially intelligent iCat in comparison with a nonsocially intelligent iCat, a social and nonsocially intelligent Tiggie, and a text interface. Furthermore it showed that people indeed preferred the iCat over the text interface, possibly because the iCat's social intelligence