Study of Coordination Between Patients with Schizophrenia and Socially Assistive Robot During Physical Activity

The goal of this study was to analyze the interpersonal coordination of patients suffering from schizophrenia (SZ) using a humanoid robot NAO. NAO was controlled by a neurally-inspired model that enables motions synchronization between robot and human. Using a robot has the advantage in that it can be modified and controlled without being influenced by the human with whom they are interacting. More specifically, we were interested in non-intentional interpersonal coordination which has been found in previous studies to be preserved for SZ. We performed an experiment in which we asked patients and control participants to jointly perform fitness movements with the robot which was programmed to either synchronize with the human (a bidirectional condition) or move at a fixed frequency with them (a unidirectional condition). We showed that non-intentional interpersonal coordination was preserved for SZ during Human/Robot interaction (as for human/human interaction). Also, the best synchronization, stability and the best performance in term of speed were obtained with the bidirectional condition. Our results showed that, in this specific context of an interaction at preferential frequency of subject, there were only a few differences between SZ and controls in terms of interpersonal synchronization skills. Nevertheless, we observed more variability for SZ which could partly be explained by the weaker intrapersonal coordination that they exhibited.

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