DATES AND SUBMISSIONS

In recent years there has been a push towards bringing robots into healthcare as part of patient-facing roles. This has been accentuated by the current pandemic where human-human interaction has become a thing to avoid which has resulted in an increased interest in the use of assistive technology such as Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) in the healthcare sector. While the aim is admirable, current SARs are still facing great challenges even in normal day to day interaction. Some of the main causes are hardware and software that have been designed to support reactive single-user interactions with the robot waiting to be instructed. This is complemented by limitations in understanding the robot’s surrounding environment including the beliefs and motivations of its interaction partners. This often leads to miscommunication which is detrimental in a domain that requires absolute trust such as in healthcare.

While decades of research in HRI have been dedicated to creating robotic systems that can interact with humans, the task of providing healthcare requires special attention due to its delicate nature and the required trust in the interaction partner. If robots are to be accepted in patient-facing roles, their behaviour must be reliable and trustworthy as well as explainable and auditable. So, while the use of robots in healthcare could have a tremendous social impact and help shape the future of care provision, there are still large hurdles to overcome. This is where our workshop aims to start the discussion surrounding problems and solutions to create reliable and trustworthy SARs for healthcare applications.

REDOUBLE aims to bring together researchers from the fields of Human-Robot Interaction, Trust in AI, XAI, Healthcare, Ethics, Social Sciences, etc. to discuss topics related to the use of robots as care providers or support for care staff, the issues they face to gain the required trust to fulfil their role, and the societal issues surrounding this movement.

List of Topics

Topics include but are not limited to:

Robotics and Healthcare

Novel use-cases for Robots in Healthcare

User Studies

Concept papers on Trust

Methods to measure Trust

Trust Acceptance of Robotics in Healthcare

Ethics, Privacy and data security concerns.

Important Dates (Tentative)

Submission: July 14th, 2021. - Extended Deadline -

Notification of acceptance: July 21st, 2021.

The workshop will be held over two days on August 8th and 12th 2021.

Publication Instructions

All papers are to be submitted via the submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=redouble2021. Short papers (2-4 pages excl. references) and full papers (4-6 pages excl. references) should use the templates provided by the main conference: https://ro-man2021.org/full-papers/.

Presentation and Publication

All accepted full and short papers will be presented orally and published in the proceedings through arXiv.