2nd Workshop on Social Robots in Therapy and care

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users in both social and emotional dimensions. Robots used for these tasks must be designed with several user groups in mind, including both individuals receiving therapy and care professionals responsible for the treatment. These robots must also be able to perceive their context of use, recognize human actions and intentions, and follow the therapeutic goals to perform meaningful and personalized treatment. Effective interactions require for robots to be capable of coordinated, timely behavior in response to social cues. This means being able to estimate and predict levels of engagement, attention, intentionality and emotional state during human-robot interactions. An additional challenge for social robots in therapy and care is the wide range of needs and conditions the different users can have during their interventions, even if they may share the same pathologies their current requirements and the objectives of their therapies can varied extensively. Therefore, it becomes crucial for robots to adapt their behaviors and interaction scenario to the specific needs, preferences and requirements of the patients they interact with. This personalization should be considered in terms of the robot behavior and the intervention scenario and must reflect the needs, preferences and requirements of the user.

The second iteration of this workshop builds on the success of the previous version hosted at the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. This time, we continue the discussion on approaches and challenges of developing these social robots and discuss recent advances and research contributions on HRI in RAT and social robot care. The following challenges will be covered:

How to conduct long-term studies with robot-assisted therapy in the wild?

How can long-term, personalized and persistent relationships between robot and user be established, and what does such relationships comprise?

What requirements control architectures of social robots should acquire for autonomous behavior in health-care interventions? What are the appropriate level of autonomy for robot in therapy and care?

How will robots autonomously read and interpret social signals during interactions?

How to generate models of social interactions allowing the robot to adapt to the user and follow the rules and goals of the therapy?

Topics of Interest:

• Social intelligence for robots in therapy and care.
• Adaptive mechanisms for robot used in therapy and care.
• Personalize and persistent HRI in therapy and care.
• Affect and engagement in therapy and care HRI.
• Trust and collaboration in therapy and care HRI.
• Modeling patients, therapist, and robots relationships.
• Shared or full autonomy in robots in therapy and care.
• User and patient-centered HRI studies.
• Long-term therapeutic interaction studies.
• Acceptance studies on social robots used in therapy.
• Clinical validation of robot-assisted therapies.
• Ethical challenges for social care robots.

Target Audience:

The primary audience of the workshop are researchers in the field of Human Robot Interaction, Robot-Assisted Therapy and Robots in Health and Social Care. In particular, researchers working with the elderly, individuals with physical or cognitive impairments and in rehabilitation therapy, patient-centered HRI evaluation, the ethical and moral implications of robotics in health and social care will be interested in this workshop.

The use of robots in social therapies requires a highly interdisciplinary collaboration among engineers, roboticist, computer scientists, psychologist, therapists, ethicists health-care professionals. In general, we are convinced that this workshop will attract a broad target audience, as the topic is of huge interest in the community. We expect an interdisciplinary audience.

How to Submit:

Before submission authors should carefully read the Information for Authors.

Workshop candidates are requested to send a 2-4 page contribution about a research related to the topics described above. All manuscripts must be submitted in PDF format through EasyChair and will be peer-reviewed based on relevance to the workshop.

A template can be found at IEEE format, Overleaf format.

The deadline for submission is January 30, 2019