Physiotherapists' Acceptance of a Socially Assistive Robot in Ongoing Clinical Deployment

We report on physiotherapists' acceptance of a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) as a therapeutic aid for paediatric rehabilitation. The SAR is undergoing in situ evaluation while being deployed as part of the clinical care of paediatric rehabilitation patients at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. The robot is equipped to lead rehabilitation sessions of up to 30 minutes under the guidance of a therapist, and without technician support or Wizard-of-Oz operation. In this paper we report on quantitative and qualitative data collected from 8 therapists participating in our study across 19 rehabilitation sessions. Data were collected after each therapy session. Our results show our system achieves a high degree of acceptance, particularly with respect to its perceived usefulness, and ease-of-use. Moreover, multiple sessions operating the SAR appears to strengthen positive perceptions of our system.

[1]  Allison Druin,et al.  A storytelling robot for pediatric rehabilitation , 2000, Assets '00.

[2]  L. Cronbach.  Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests , 1951 .

[3]  Peter Sincak,et al.  Experience with the Children-Humanoid Interaction in Rehabilitation Therapy for Spinal Disorders , 2012, RiTA.

[4]  Bilge Mutlu,et al.  Robots in organizations: The role of workflow, social, and environmental factors in human-robot interaction , 2008, 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[5]  Bert Arnrich,et al.  Socially assistive child-robot interaction in physical exercise coaching , 2017, 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[6]  Leon Sterling,et al.  "Help me help you": a human-assisted social robot in paediatric rehabilitation , 2016, OZCHI.

[7]  Lisa Wise,et al.  Adapting a General-Purpose Social Robot for Paediatric Rehabilitation through In Situ Design , 2017, HRI 2018.

[8]  Amy J. Brisben,et al.  The CosmoBot TM System : Evaluating its Usability in Therapy Sessions with Children Diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy * , 2005 .

[9]  Volodymyr Kozyavkin,et al.  Humanoid social robots in the rehabilitation of children with cerebral palsy , 2014, PervasiveHealth.

[10]  Vanessa Evers,et al.  Measuring acceptance of an assistive social robot: a suggested toolkit , 2009, RO-MAN 2009 - The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[11]  José Carlos González,et al.  Evaluating the Child–Robot Interaction of the NAOTherapist Platform in Pediatric Rehabilitation , 2017, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[12]  Leon Sterling,et al.  In-Situ Design and Development of a Socially Assistive Robot for Paediatric Rehabilitation , 2017, HRI.

[13]  Hanafiah Yussof,et al.  Potential use of Social Assistive Robot based rehabilitation for children with Cerebral Palsy , 2016, 2016 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and Manufacturing Automation (ROMA).

[14]  V. Braun,et al.  Using thematic analysis in psychology , 2006 .

[15]  Marina Fridin,et al.  Robotics Agent Coacher for CP motor Function (RAC CP Fun) , 2014, Robotica.