Socially-Assistive Emotional Robot that Learns from the Wizard During the Interaction for Preventing Low Back Pain in Children

Abstract

Back pain causes more global disability than any other health problem studied and the number of patients is growing. In Europe and in the US it is the number one cause of lost work days. This paper propounds a new approach by exploring the effect of utilizing a humanoid robot as a therapy-assistive tool in educating children to perform back exercises designed by a professional therapist. In our previous research a NAO robot was programmed and employed as a robotic assistant to a human physiotherapist to perform exercises in an elementary school in Slovakia. This paper goes further in designing a Wizard of Oz, where the exercises can be controlled and intervened by motivational behaviors of the robot (emotional expressions). Currently we are developing a system based on reinforcement learning that should adopt the motivational interventions from the Wizard. The promising results of this study in the physical therapy suggest the effective future use of social robots in reducing the symptoms of the most extended global disability in the world.